[wegs]

I kinda feel like there ought to be some coherent effort to archive all this documentation, beyond archive.org (perhaps in collaboration with?).

Good developer docs have source code, and are often interactive (you can play with code in a sandbox). Much of that stuff is either on personal web sites and blogs (often with unknown licensing) or behind corporate paywalls.

There ought to be a place this stuff goes, and is forever archived, searchable, and usable.

I'd actually extend that beyond software too. Educational materials. Service manuals for my car or vacuum cleaner. There's lots of stuff which ought to live forever for the benefit of humanity. And perhaps software itself. I ought to be able to pull up Netscape 2.0 or Flash and run it in a sandbox.

Archive.org is designed to archive everything on the web. I'm thinking something thoughtful and deliberate where people (even paying for it) stick content into a permanent archive. If I'm running a startup, and I'd like to give you a guarantee of long-term support, I stick my support materials there, and they can outlast me.

Hmmm... That was a bit rambling and not too crisp, but perhaps someone can think of ways to make it crisp?