Durability

How to take this and keep it

This site will go down eventually. Everything does. GeoCities went down. Posterous went down. Free hosting tiers holding entire life's works go down every week without anyone announcing it.

So the promise here is not that it stays up. The promise is that it going down costs you nothing, and you can verify that claim in about two minutes rather than trusting it.

The whole work is files

The work itself is files. Reading it touches no database, no content system, no export tool and no account. The objection docket does have a small database behind it; nothing about reading this page goes near it. The complete text is one markdown file at /index.md. Save it. That is the work. It will still open in thirty years in anything that reads text.

The license permits mirroring

This version of this essay is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0. You may copy it and host it, whole and unchanged, with the attribution kept, and you do not need to ask. Commercial use and adapted versions are not licensed. Converting the unchanged text to another format so you can keep it, PDF, EPUB, plain text, print, is fine.

That is deliberately narrow rather than generous. A work that cannot legally be mirrored has exactly one point of failure, which is the thing this essay is about. A work that anyone may sell has a different problem, and it is not one durability requires solving.

The licence covers this version and nothing else. No commitment is made here about future versions, about a book, or about any other work.

Where the independent copies live

Mirrors only help if they fail for different reasons, which is principle 7 applied to this page. Three are planned, in places with different owners, different funding and different jurisdictions: a public source repository where forking is mirroring performed by strangers, the Internet Archive, and a permanent archive with a citable identifier so the reference survives this domain.

None of the three exists yet. So this page currently carries a declared expectation with no observed outcome behind it, which is a declaration nobody can yet check, and that is the weaker half of principle 4. It is mine. Links appear here when each one is real and not before.

Versions never move

The address you are reading holds the current version. From the first time this text changes, every superseded version gets its own permanent address which is never edited or removed, so a citation keeps pointing at the words that were there when it was made. There are no earlier versions yet, so there is nothing at those addresses to link to.

Why this page exists

Any site can print the word "forever." A platform that ships its own exit, and makes it testable, is making a claim you can check. That is the only version of the promise worth anything, and it is the one thing about permanence that cannot be faked with a sentence.