One month ago, on February 26, 2006, I strong-armed Greg “grog” Lehey over IRC into letting me provide him an account on a machine to act as a download mirror for his book, The Complete FreeBSD. This while I was drafting the article submission to Slashdot, just in case. The announcement that the book was now available for free under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license was made several days prior and syndicated on a number of other more niche geek news sites. After the /. article went live on the 27’th, Greg decided to make use of the mirror, and switched the primary download site to Evilcode.net. Shortly thereafter traffic leveled off at around 7Mbit and slowly tapered off over the next few days. This from a post that did not even hit the main page.
Now, one month later, Evilcode.net is still acting as the primary download mirror for The Complete FreeBSD. By my rough count it has consumed so far in the neighborhood of 75GB of transfer, which breaks down as, roughly mind you… 7500 copies of the PDF version, 3400 copies of the PostScript version and 1000 copies of the book sources. Not too shabby!
I would like to extend my most sincere thanks to grog not for just disseminating this valuable resource openly as he has done, but also for its existence in paper form in the first place. I still have fond memories of receiving and reading my copy of the second edition some years ago when I was a FreeBSD novice. Not only that, but for years of valuable contributions to the FreeBSD project. The developer community would not be the same without you Greg, you are one of the good guys.