Deja Users Whine Over Google Acquisition

Many years ago, Deja News began archiving all Usenet feeds and making its archive publicly available. Back when Deja first started there was a lot of hype about how valuable owning a complete archive of Usenet would be. In fact Deja was just one of several companies who were talking about building a business on top of Usenet.

To my knowledge Deja never came close to being profitable even though it tried every idea under the sun to turn a profit (they certainly deserve an A for effort). It looked like Deja was going to go under and take their Usenet database with them, when Google announced they were purchasing the Usenet database.

That sounded like a perfect arrangement to me. Unfortunately, a lot of Deja users are whining because Google took part of the Deja archive offline for awhile to better integrate the Usenet archive with Google’s other services. A typical comment is from Deja user Frank Davies,

I used Deja three or more times a day. I’m enraged that it has been taken from me. It’s as if a private firm bought and then closed down all of Manhattan’s public libraries for a few months simply because they wanted to rearrange the bookshelves.

Give me a break. As someone on Slashdot added, maybe he should sue and demand his money back!

Since all Usenet posts are available publicly, there is nothing stopping anyone who wants to create their own searchable archive from doing so, and anybody paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall months ago that Deja’s archive was in serious trouble. For these people to whine that Deja and/or Google owes them something — especially the source code Deja uses for searching Usenet — is ludicrous.

Davies claims that, “We simply cannot lose access to the collected wisdom that is contained in Usenet. It’s an important piece of history that must be preserved.” Well, okay, lets see him put up the money needed to maintain such an archive. The bottom line is that doing so is simply not cheap and rather than blasting Google for coming to Deja’s rescue, they should be glad that somebody’s willing to take a risk of putting up real money for the archive.

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