As a new father I have to chime in and say I'm very disappointed to see hackety hack and shoes go away. It was exciting to see his talk from Art & Code, and I was looking forward to using both of those tools to teach my children.
In response to the article and comments, there are a lot of people here who immediately dismiss the article because its written by Zed, and still others who deem _why's actions acceptable because he's an 'artist'. Assuming _why is ok and he just decided to log off, Zed is right in this case. _why has transcended being an artist by creating art that does not only have aesthetic beauty, but also has substantial value to the people who have used it and who have invested time into it. The fact that he has created solid documentation in addition to releasing his projects in a public distributed system geared towards sharing and reuse is proof that he was at least interested in having other people use his projects. Which means he has a social obligation to not actively screw over his user base so he can be dramatic. Just wait, I can see Eric Raymond writing a new chapter about the responsibilities associated with releasing code to the open source community. Maybe this is a sign we need an equivalent of archive.org for code so that nothing like this can happen again.
It doesn't seem to have caught Shoes (too new?), but seems after a glance to at least have most of the important stuff for Hackety Hack. When you consider that (helped but not entirely due to to DCVS) the source code is all over, it doesn't seem to me that much was actually lost -- just a little misplaced.
In response to the article and comments, there are a lot of people here who immediately dismiss the article because its written by Zed, and still others who deem _why's actions acceptable because he's an 'artist'. Assuming _why is ok and he just decided to log off, Zed is right in this case. _why has transcended being an artist by creating art that does not only have aesthetic beauty, but also has substantial value to the people who have used it and who have invested time into it. The fact that he has created solid documentation in addition to releasing his projects in a public distributed system geared towards sharing and reuse is proof that he was at least interested in having other people use his projects. Which means he has a social obligation to not actively screw over his user base so he can be dramatic. Just wait, I can see Eric Raymond writing a new chapter about the responsibilities associated with releasing code to the open source community. Maybe this is a sign we need an equivalent of archive.org for code so that nothing like this can happen again.