So, Firefox 2.0 is due to be released tomorrow… or today, if you believe some of the posts on Digg, Slashdot, Metafilter and everywhere else. Of course, what’s really happened is someone with way too much time on their hands is sniffing around any FTP server to see if files turn up ahead of the official announcement — and then they post that info to Slashdot or whatever, and end up causing problems for a number of other folks:
- Digg and Reddit posts linking to direct FTP mirrors could be costing the operators of those mirrors hundreds to thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills, or may cause them to crash by linking directly to them. This could cause them to “un-volunteer” their services as a mirror, making it even harder to obtain Firefox on release days.
- People posting direct link to FTP mirrors don’t know if that mirror is a member of the Mozilla FTP Mirror Farm, or some random, unverified mirror. We work hard to verify that the mirrors in our farm are serving the same bits we released, and we cannot make the same claim about other mirrors that aren’t part of our farm. When using direct FTP links to random mirrors, users run the risk of downloading bits that have not been checked to ensure they do not contain a virus or trojan.
- “That’s ok,” you say: “I link directly to ftp.mozilla.org!” That can be even worse! Killing the project’s FTP server does not help anyone, least of all people trying to obtain Firefox builds. And it makes for a grumpy IT group. And nobody wants grumpy IT groups. Especially a day before a release.
Be sure to read the whole post on preed’s blog — he makes a lot of good points. This has been going on for years and years. I don’t really entertain much hope that it will change, but maybe a few readers will read this and understand that it’s really bad netiquette.
