Bitsavers subscription

[Jay West]

I credit Guy Sotomayor with the original idea, a few others chimed in as 
well. So I ran it by Al Kossow and this was officially blessed by him....

The plan is for me to offer subscriptions to bitsavers for a fee. The idea 
is that you can sign up for a subscription and pick just the specific 
directory trees you want, or the entire archive. You are initially sent a 
complete copy of all the trees you selected (or full archive) on the medium 
of your choice (CD, DVD, HD, etc.). From that point on - for the 
subscription fee - you are automatically shipped a set of updates 
periodically - say every month? - that keeps your own personal bitsavers 
archive up to date. Perhaps this automated system could also allow purchase 
of a "one-off" cd/dvd without a subscription containing just the files 
and/or directories that you tag.

Why purchase a subscription? Well, for one - it keeps you from having to 
constantly check bitsavers for what is new and download those files. It also 
will hopefully reduce the bandwidth on the site for people who decide they 
want a full copy. It gives you a way to get all the files in a courteous 
manner and keep up to date. Another reason - the cost of the subscription 
would be just a bit higher than the cost of media. The overage above the 
cost of media goes to the care and feeding of the classiccmp server. That 
means by buying a subscription you are helping to subsidize the cost of the 
classiccmp hardware, bandwidth usage, etc. etc. This is much like the 
FreeBSD CDROM subscription if you're familiar with that. You can get the 
identical bits elsewhere, but buying a CD subscription is convenient and 
directly supports the cause.

I would also point out that this in no way changes your ability to download 
files directly from bitsavers or any of the mirrors for free. This is merely 
a packaging/update service to be viewed as a donation to the cause and a 
convenience for those who want to stay current on bitsavers. I am going to 
check with the developer working on the classiccmp website to see if this 
(tracking the membership, what directories they want, building the burn 
directories, etc.) is  something that will fit well into code he has already 
done for the new classiccmp. If it is, great. If not, then I'll ask him if 
he wants this task. If not, then I'll come back to the list and see if 
people educated in the ways of php/mysql wish to contribute time to creating 
the software.

Of course, if no one is interested, I'll just continue making the occasional 
trip downtown to the datacenter and burning CD's for people at no charge. It 
would be nice if there was interest in this though!

Jay West