datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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I think you misunderstood. they don't restrict it to be petty. Allowing lots of concurrent downloads means paying for more bandwidth, or it means the site goes down.
The classic hug of death
Torrents exist.
sure, and eventually that'd be a good way to share them. Either way, loosening limits on downloads would crush their servers now
But they could keep those limits in place and crowdsource bandwidth capacity now using torrents of rompacks
This would be a good option for preservation and to spread the load. I just downloaded GIMP yesterday and they have a torrent link to download their software.