Re: [gNewSense-users] Recent activity of sharing free software materials

[Sam Geeraerts]

Bake Timmons wrote:
> I wanted to mention what I have noticed recently about sharing of free
> software materials:
>
> 1.  I recall some discussion many months ago about trying to share
> gNewSense among other different groups of people and am glad to mention
> that I have been getting a little help in spreading the word among
> women.  Nothing wrong with a little variety. :)
Good. It always makes me happy when women and libre software are brought 
closer together. Same for libre software in education.

> 2.  After months of uploading 8 GB/day of mostly free software related
> materials over file sharing networks, I have noticed an unusual *uptick*
> in the uploading of my copy of the main gNewSense 1.1 Live CD image in
> the past two days.  Typically in the past, it may have risen to one or
> two, but lately it has been about a half dozen scattered all over the
> planet.  It's a good thing that I cannot explain, especially given how
> old the download is. :)
>
> 3.  The materials in *heaviest* demand are in *Spanish*, e.g., certain
> videotaped speeches of RMS are regularly requested.  Hmm.
>
> 4.  If anyone is lucky enough like me to have some bandwidth to spare, I
> hope that they condider using the eDonkey network in addition to
> BitTorrent.  I have uploaded hundreds of gigabytes of free software
> material in the past few months using the excellent MLDonkey software
> (monitoring it occasionally from its web interface), and it seems to be
> a good way to reach some users beyond BitTorrent users.
Every so often I search on torrent sites for libre Theora and Vorbis 
content to share. I seldomly share other formats because I want to 
promote free codecs. I'm not a huge fan of the donkey, but maybe I'll 
try it again some time. I do share stuff that I don't understand that 
might be usefull to others (I've got some Scandinavian and Spanish videos).

A problem we have with this in Belgium is a limit to how much you can 
down/upload per month. It's about 10 to 15 GB in total for a regular 
subscription. Downloading updates for a few machines, a few distros and 
some podcasts doesn't leave an awful lot of room left for just sharing.

> I am new to file sharing and feel that it will become more important to
> free software--technically, politically, and socially.  I look forward
> to the greater use of file sharing to install and upgrade free software
> systems, such as the use of debtorrent:
>
> http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/