[weblacky]

[...] If he didn't want to run it any more, he could at least have given some notice, or tried to hand the data over to someone else to run.

If one wanted to avoid drama and cut clean, he would do just as he did. The fact that people are still talking about it now is a perfect example. Imagine the folderol of the announcement alone. All the accompanying pearl clutching, teeth gnashing, ass kissing, finger pointing and dagger gripping... a veritable renaissance painting level of drama. Who gets the data? Is he still liable in perpetuity? Etc. Easy fix. Kill it. Besides, it gave a shot for the new community to attempt to build something for itself instead of just creating videos of things others had done. Pete owes and owed us nothing, ever.

Not mad, just the way it looked from down in the trenches.

Hmmmmmm.... There's one huge flaw in this argument, which otherwise makes perfect sense,"Pete" didn't produce any content. The content was produced by users under the guise of helping others and posting it in a public place. You can talk about who owns the rights to what but just like YouTube the owner, in this case, didn't generate content, he just housed it.
Because it was up for so long people trusted him to do that. If he was going to be taken it down the least he could've done was allowed users to download their own content to push up someplace else. It's akin to getting free storage at a warehouse and then having all your stuff stolen when the warehouse is decommissioned/emptied and razed to the ground.

It's not totally sure what the content is really worth but it was made off with like a thief in the night. Well, there's not much legally you could do but there is a social and moral contract when it comes to forums. That the success of the forum and its usefulness is normally a direct result of the participation of it users who are informed and have high-level abilities to solve problems. Taking away someone's platform is worrying enough but all the literature disappeared with it.

There's still some of that we have not gotten back. I'll say that most of the technicals have been patched back together recently through scraping through personal notes and experimentation the one thing we won't get back is the personal testimonies of the people who actually lived the experiences of administration and field support for the systems. That is the on-site history of SGI as far as the public is concerned. Because it was running while SGI was still in business and even included old timers that used to be employees that would tell stories. That has its own value independent of the technical support aspect. I sincerely hope that one day somebody encounters the data dump and can publish it in some form that we can archive. It was the focused participation and effort by many thousands of people over many years. That lost effort is the true cost.