[jayvanguard]

> On what planet is shutting down a service, with months and months of notice, evil?

The current planet? Open source projects have a lifetime of years so five months is not that long in the scheme of things. People put there code on there and participated (providing Google content that they were able to use and drive traffic) with the expectation that it would be there for the long term.

[oldmanjay]

This is a rather watery definition of evil. It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

[walterbell]

Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

Or a library to burn down its own buildings? Or Google to delete all scans of old books?

History matters, because citations to "old" research/code may become more valuable with new requirements and research. Surely a company that "organizes the world's information" needs no explanation of these topics.

[krapp]

>Would it be ok for Google to delete Usenet archives?

If it's their archives, yes.

And if those are the only archives of Usenet in existence, then it's not Google's fault no one else cared to back it up.

[bigiain]

Somebody else did have a usenet archive - Google bought them, mashed up a bunch of other nn-usenet Google stuff into it, then let it bitrot until it was effectively useless, and then removed the only search features that worked...

(Admittedly, if I recall correctly, Dejanews had already gone broke trying to maintain that archive before Google bought it, so arguably Google didn't kill it, they just bought the dying corpse and kept it animated in a zombie-like state for a decade or so past it's natural death...)

[krapp]

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents?

This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything. Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets.

I understand the importance of maintaining references, but realistically, expecting URLS to be permanent is shortsighted at best, unless you own that domain and the server it's on and expect to have the money to keep the rights to it in perpetuity. You can't expect a third party host to be willing to keep the servers on forever.

But as far as the historical record and the data itself - Google's given warning, people can move their data or lose it. Fork and move on.

[makomk]

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)

[Angostura]

> It is fairly close to saying a restaurant is evil for not keeping a menu item you like.

Actually closer to saying they are evil for destroying humanity's only copy of the recipe.

[npizzolato]

After shouting loudly they are going to destroy it and waiting months for anyone to come copy the recipe.