SSS is a Hit!
A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.
We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.
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Tags: Dave Turnbull, Digg, Internet, Not For Profits, Online Marketing, Open Source, Software, Software for Starving Students, SSS, Technology, Utah, Volunteerism, Web Traffic, Xmission