Why does making it "public" or "non-profit" make a difference? Things disappear because no one is paying to keep them up, either directly in time or indirectly

Why does making it "public" or "non-profit" make a difference? Things disappear because no one is paying to keep them up, either directly in time or indirectly with money. The government cuts off projects all of the time causing them to disappear. Witness, for instance, how Henry the VIII cut off Catholic monasteries effectively destroying their archives. Even things sent to well-funded organizations like the US National Archives disappear in confusion. So while I think you're right that places like arXiv make more sense, I don't think that they're automatically better. And it's an interesting question whether distributed, open source versions have an advantage. Sure, people can clone repos, but there's often no main person who promises to keep the repo alive making it possible for everyone to just assume someone else will cache a copy. This is a very complex problem at the deepest level.