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95% of the work for a useful product like this is figuring out how to ensure it survives your dumb business model or the idiocy of the tech industry, and yet none of the words on this landing page explain what work they've done on that.

did they not understand that at all? did they just not do any work on it? or did they understand it and do great work but just fail to but it in 100pt text as item 0 on the list? who knows.



This isn’t a tech product. It’s a decentralized archive organized by Harvard Law School Library.

Being literal librarians, I am fairly sure the creators of this service have thought through how it will remain accessible in the long term.


then why don't they mention the most important thing, which they are presumably extremely aware of, on the promo page for the product?


"Fairly sure", well why didn't they say that in their blurb!?

The site copywriters seem to have very carefully made associations with Harvard whilst maintaining perma.cc as a separate entity to which they, Harvard, owe no obligations.

"Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries."

They built it, they organise it, but what they don't seem to do is provide any guarantees with/through/towards it.

Sure, who wants to take on obligations, make promises. Much easier to hide behind vague expressions of how great librarians are (it's a noble calling). 'Trust me bro' is pretty hard to go with for commercial enterprises regardless of who started them.

They clearly thought through the future, hence the 'we don't owe you anything when we sell the service to X/Alphabet/Meta or whoever' language.

How much budget have Harvard set aside for long-term maintenance?

It looks useful.


...don't judge a project by its landing page. Especially if it's as well run as this one, by the looks of it.




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