[02] WHAT IS THE BENEFIT OF HAVING A JOURNAL, GALLERY, ET CETERA SDF? The single most important aspect of this all is that you and you alone own and retain all rights to your content. There are many commercial sites on the INTERNET these days and while they offer you services without taking your money, they aren't necessarily free. In nearly all cases you are forced to accept an end user agreement that releases all rights to what you put on their servers. You may not care about this but most SDF members realize that in the long term giving up rights to your photos, music, artwork, thoughts and ideas in exchange for "free hosting" will most likely be something you'll regret. Another aspect is that SDF allows you access to several key areas that the majority of commercial operations restrict: 1) You have access to your logfile. This documents every request made for your URL. MOTD logfiles persist for a year and are rolled over on January 1st 00:00:01. 2) You have access to your database. You can log directly into your database and manipulate your tables and data yourself. 3) You have access to the framework. All software packages used in the MOTD membership are available to MOTD members to make updates, changes and fixes. Likewise, members can submit their own software for other members to use and collaborate on. The main benefit of this is the ability to quickly update source distributions when security flaws are discovered. Source distributions are kept in /sys/motd which is available from all systems on the SDF network. Files are versioned via the RCS. [[motd|back]]