StepWise is no more
stepwise.com
StepWise was a place for technical content on the NeXT platform and what followed it. It was not very active recently anyway.
stepwise.com
I'm assuming that if he asks them to, Archive.org will remove it from their archives?
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about Stepwise or the author, so hopefully I don't offend anyone.
Things like this and the disappearance of newmogul.com make me nervous about the ability of one individual to destroy knowledge on a whim. It might be useful to have offshore archive centers where it's harder to get rid of stuff like this. Yeah, I know this was the property of this one guy, and he has the right to destroy it, but something about it doesn't sit well. Sites like this seem to be a collection of knowledge from many different people, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it disappear overnight.
What if archive.org decided on a whim to disappear into the night? That's a lot of knowledge lost.
Maybe the answer is decentralized archival in general. Some kind of opt-in network where people agree to store a bit of the internet on their machine. Hmm...in fact, we already do this with caching. Maybe some kind of browser plugin that makes use of those cache files for decentralized archival purposes?
Sorry...rambling a bit. It's an interesting problem.
I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will.
But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.
I'm not sure what to do with them now though...
I can understand shutting down the site. I can understand having new interests or priorities. But what I can't understand is why people can't just leave things in place with a disclaimer. This isn't 2001, bandwidth, hosting space, domain names, and disk space are all incredibly cheap. Why burn the bridge and scorch the earth behind you?
"Stepwise consisted of thousands of files. I didn't feel it was possible to locate and remove the files that were copyright by a single individual."
(explanation link: http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-de... )
I'm crossing my fingers that at least this section of the site returns some day.
"But I could not live with some of that content remaining on the site."
It just sounds like there is more to this story that we aren't going to hear about.