the risk of centralisation

So I don't really have much to say here but this is mostly just to add a "see, that's what happens" with regards to an apparent on-going problem with sourceforge.

I noticed a maintenance message a couple of times in the last few days and just put it down to being on the wrong side of the world as per usual; but it seems they've had some disk failures and restoring a site of that magnitude to full functionality isn't a trivial task.

Of course, the catch-cry is to use github, but that is also at the whim of hardware faults or just economics (as in the case of google code's demise), and savannah isn't immune to either. This also holds for blogger and wordpress and all these other centralised services, whether they be 'free-but-you-are-the-product' ones or paid services.

Not that I think the software i've been playing with has any intention to be the solution to this problem but decentralisation is an obvious answer to managing this risk. It may mean individual sites and projects are more susceptible to overload, failure, or even vanishing from history; but by being isolated it better preserves the totality of the culture represented in these sites and projects. Economically it may also be more expensive in total but as the cost is spread wider that concern just doesn't apply (parallelism and concurrency is wonderful like that).

I was already focusing on my current software project being 'anti-enterprise' - not in an economic or political sense but in an engineering sense - but events like this encourage me.