in reply to Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution

While it's a prudent idea, I think that two aspects come into play. First, to publish such a CD, you'd need the assent of EVERY person that's posted to the site, and to some extent, the assent for every POST by every person. This may be beyond impossible, and for those people that aren't contacted or refuse to give assent, it may critically break a thread to uselessness (eg, just getting the answers to a question). The second issue is cost; I doubt there would really be that large of a potental buyers market for this CD as you might think; PM is strictly something that people hear about online unlike, say, a print journal, and the few that might know about it will certainly not offset the cost of large-scale CD production to make it a profit for vroom.

Also, the frequency is too high for what you think. Without knowing what is actually stored, I would suspect we are barely over 650megs total (you're looking at more than 6000bytes a node for that), and that's after 1.5 years of operation. Maybe a distribution of some sort every half year or the like, if such a project were to go on.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

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Re: Re: Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution
by bladx (Chaplain) on Aug 13, 2001 at 08:00 UTC
    You have brought up some very insightful points, masem that I have seemed to overlook in this idea. I understand fully that we would have to have the assent of every person who has ever posted items to this site, and that makes sense, because of all of the legality, etc. In response to this point, my idea would be that we would have to narrow it down to a few sections of the site, such as simply the code archives, and maybe snippets, so that way it would drastically reduce who we would have to get permission from. If they didn't wish to give their permission, then they could perhaps simply take off their code and not use it on the cd.

    Next in answer to your good points about it being an online print type of item, which it is definently, is that they could try to make only a select few of the cd's at first, to just test out the waters of who might even buy one, over the internet perhaps. Maybe it would be a good buy for those that would like to have the code all in one place on a cd that they wouldn't have to use the internet to view the items on it... such as people who may still have a slow internet connection, etc. Even better than doing that first, you could also conduct a voting poll, to see if anyone would even consider paying for this type of thing, if yes, go for it, if not, can the idea, and think of something else.

    I think my first point will answer your third good point which was the size that the cd would be able to hold. If we only were to put one or two sections on each cd, that (if I am correct,) wouldn't take tons of space, provided it didn't include every single item ever posted in those specific sections. Perhaps if they started from two months or three months ago.

    masem you made some very good reasons why not to try this type of distribution, but I hope I have answered some of your reasons not to with my reasons. You might not agree with all of them, but that's ok. Thanks for the input though!

    Andy Summers
[reply]
      They aren't insightful points, they are the same ones that get raised every single time this come up.

      Always, there are a bunch of people who stand around going "Nope. You can't do it." no matter what is suggested. You can just imagine what they would have said if they had been asked about setting up a website for Perl discussion:

      "Nope. You can't do that. Nobody will post because their words might get used."

      I'm quite glad that they weren't asked.

      I rather like the idea, because a couple of times I have needed to look something up, and PerlMonks has been down. I can recall wishing that I had a local copy to refer to. I even considered mirroring it, but thought that would be a rude bandwidth hit on EDC. I'd sling Aus$20 to someone for a copy of the PM CDROM.

      ____________________
      Jeremy
      "Someone pass me a lawyer. I can't wait for the revolution!"

[reply]
        I would probably think that 99.9% of the PM userbase would care little that their posts were being used in another medium. And if the world worked like I'd like it (and as you'd like it to,o I would hypothesize), as long as you are posting something in the public medium (here, Usenet, /., whatever), it becomes part of the public domain and therefore, anyone can do whatever they want with it.

        Unfortunately, there are lawyers and laws that work against this. Biggest case in point: a recent US Supreme Court case ruled that freelance writers who had their work published in print newspapers have the ability to allow or disallow the inclusion of these articles into other mediums (CDroms, online databases, etc). All you need is one person of that other 0.1% saying that they did not autherize the reproduction of their post in an alternative medium, and PM's got a lawsuit on it's hands, which I agree we all don't want.

        How can it be fixed: two possibilities come to mind. Have a box or form data that needs to be filled in when creating a new account that tells the new user that they acknowledge that by posting on PM, they are allowing their words to be used in other media forms if it comes to pass. Add some similar mechanism for all existing users to acknowledge this as well, with the understanding that no reply after 2 months or so indicates acknowledgment (or disagreement, depending on if one wants to be preventative or not). Now you know which posts can be redone in some manner, against despite the fact that some holes might exist. Of course, thinking in this fashion, as long as the hole doesn't exist at a root node level, you probably won't be missing much, assuming that most of the current higher-level monks agree to this.

        The other option is to have someone else do this without PM's blessing; grabbing nodes is easy thanks to XML, and one can create their own archive. But this person then opens themselves up to legal problems as described above.

        -----------------------------------------------------
        Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

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