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I'm not wholly a fan of Aaron's approach here, but this critique seems a bit off-base. JSTOR wasn't the organization doing the research and development. Variou
by scarmig 10y ago
I'm not wholly a fan of Aaron's approach here, but this critique seems a bit off-base.
JSTOR wasn't the organization doing the research and development. Various universities and academics, all tax-advantaged and often government-funded, were doing that research. And JSTOR charges them, not giving them a platform for free.
JSTOR itself does add value--it's a platform to publish, and presumably offers editing etc. But Aaron wasn't freeing any of the code that runs JSTOR, just the content it held. Compare it to the free ArXiv, which plays a similar role to JSTOR.
- j2kun 10y agoSadly, editing is also volunteered by the same academics.
- douche 10y agoDoes JSTOR add value, though? I used it a lot in college, but it's searching capabilities were terrible, and most of the articles were incredibly poorly scanned, almost unreadable.
- scarmig 10y agoYes. Just because nowadays you can imagine much better implementations doesn't change how much a step forward it was in the 90s. There's a reason Aaron was able to download huge amounts of human knowledge in a couple hours. It'd have been pretty much impossible for him to do what he did before some organization like JSTOR.