I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.
[1] A synonym for "goods" or "products". See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wares
Anyway, by 1990, in the piracy circles I distantly associated with, it was quite common to pronounce it like "juarez". Sort of semi-ironically, like, it's obviously the wrong pronunciation, but nonetheless everyone uses that pronunciation on purpose. So, what could be more correct than "the thing everyone does"?
Of course, pronunciation only happens in meatspace (or at least it did back before MP3s and before YouTube and so on), and of course I'm talking about clusters of teenagers separated by thousands of km. We had "meetupz" or "meetz" in my city, which is how I know how "everyone" pronounced it... but it's certainly possible that in most cities/whatever there was some other pronunciation rule.
Citation needed there.
I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes would be described as “selling their wares”. Changing the s to a z was an obvious step in 90s internet culture.
Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you and GP mean) available for download, including images (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files, and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for various art media created by users, such as .mods or ASCII art or poetry or whatever. Those various "goods" would never be all slopped together, they'd be divided into categories. And the category called "warez" would never, ever, have anything in it other than pirated software.
I agree that the s-to-z thing is just classic hacker/leet culture, though it's not internet culture, because it predates the people in question having internet access. I'm saying that the "wares" that becomes "warez" is not "wares-as-in-goods", it's "wares-as-in-softwares". It's pluralized even though "software" is a non-count noun, because then it fits with "files", "images", and so on. And yes, ultimately the "-ware" in "software" is from the sense that you and GP are talking about; I'm saying that the etymology is not directly from there, because otherwise all the other kinds of pirated stuff would also be "warez", and it never, ever, was.
I think it was explicitly luls a lot of the time. I saw "warez" spelled as "juar3z", etc, a lot.
- war-ehz
- gee-aw-cit-eez
- jif
Some also were used as submissions for projects, long before sites like sourceforge started. Especially since plonking a bigger source dump on newsgroups wasn't exactly well received.
In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have something called a ‘buurtbieb’ aka a ‘neighborhood libraries’, which is a weatherproof cabinet where people can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood can borrow.
Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet to store candy, but why would you?
(The name is a little weird, because regular libraries are also free...)
Private libraries (mine for example) are not free, as in beer or otherwise.
People tend to call their personal library a "book collection" or the like, but it's a library, in just the same way that a Little Free Library is.
So most people who read have at least a small private library, whether they think of it in those terms or not.
Furthermore, public libraries are not necessarily free. In America they virtually are all; fees only for late returns. But this is not globally true; in some parts of the world, libraries open to the public charge a fee for checking out books, or even require a fee for entry.
It's a literal translation of "neighbourhood library", it alliterates, and it sounds cute. (Keep the "beep" part short for that).
Good luck getting a jury to enforce the trademark.
That’s like saying it would be naive and irresponsible for me to go outside without a life preserver today despite an unforeseen catastrophic global flood drowning the lands 10 years from now. It was a different world, with different expectations and frameworks.
That was a good and fun security lesson though and now I always check outside security with a mobile hotspot.
- "Man, those idiots are naive and irresponsible."
2 it s not like other people cant go to those places, thus it is kinda irresponsible
Meanwhile internet aint remote village
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