Summary: QuinStreet agrees to license a decade of news stories from LinuxDevices for republication and long-term preservation

BACK in the summer we campaigned to bring LinuxDevices back to the Web (after QuinStreet had bought it and took it offline).

Well, Techrights activism in conjunction from other pressure (from site authors) over this issue has finally paid off. The founder of that site told us yesterday that he would bring back the site after all these efforts to influence QuinStreet. He got his Christmas gift a little early. He was writing for a company (for profit) and he will soon be hosting his own work that he worked hard on to produce for many years, informing a lot of people in the GNU/Linux world (especially embedded/device developers).

In essence, we have managed to rescue ~10,000 high-quality articles from 'Internet bitrot'. It's massive!

In the near future LinuxDevices content will be republished under LinuxGizmos.com. "It will live on a subdomain of LinuxGizmos," the founder of the site told us. This is still work in progress (a developer is currently working on data conversions). When all the articles get indexed (which they will) all the information and other useful data will be easily reachable again. This is a victory to those who advocate for preservation, as some of us are (other Techrights members silently played a role in this).

The lesson to learn from this whole saga is that authors should insist on ownership (or copy rights) of their work. Without it, valuable work can go down the digital dustbin when a corporation has no interest in it, or it may take years and lots of immense effort to retrieve anything from this dustbin. ⬆