I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.
I've heard a lot of people pronounce it like that, but I'm pretty sure that's not correct. It's clearly the English word "wares"[1] with the S replaced with a Z, similar to "hackz" and "cheatz", which were also common in that era. I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original word behind it.
It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc.
Anyway, by 1990, in the piracy circles I distantly associated with, it was quite common to pronounce it like "juarez". Sort of semi-ironically, like, it's obviously the wrong pronunciation, but nonetheless everyone uses that pronunciation on purpose. So, what could be more correct than "the thing everyone does"?
Of course, pronunciation only happens in meatspace (or at least it did back before MP3s and before YouTube and so on), and of course I'm talking about clusters of teenagers separated by thousands of km. We had "meetupz" or "meetz" in my city, which is how I know how "everyone" pronounced it... but it's certainly possible that in most cities/whatever there was some other pronunciation rule.
> It's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc.
Citation needed there.
I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes would be described as “selling their wares”. Changing the s to a z was an obvious step in 90s internet culture.
Okay, so my citation is, I was there, I was a (fringe) participant in pre-internet piracy culture, starting in 1990.
Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you and GP mean) available for download, including images (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files, and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for various art media created by users, such as .mods or ASCII art or poetry or whatever. Those various "goods" would never be all slopped together, they'd be divided into categories. And the category called "warez" would never, ever, have anything in it other than pirated software.
I agree that the s-to-z thing is just classic hacker/leet culture, though it's not internet culture, because it predates the people in question having internet access. I'm saying that the "wares" that becomes "warez" is not "wares-as-in-goods", it's "wares-as-in-softwares". It's pluralized even though "software" is a non-count noun, because then it fits with "files", "images", and so on. And yes, ultimately the "-ware" in "software" is from the sense that you and GP are talking about; I'm saying that the etymology is not directly from there, because otherwise all the other kinds of pirated stuff would also be "warez", and it never, ever, was.
I'm not sure how you are missing it, but hardware and software both etymologically have ware (as in a manufactured article, product, or merchandise) built-in to them. Without ware, there would be no hardware or software, or warez. The root of these words, also silverware, cookware, courseware, Tupperware, Corningware, etc., indeed is "ware." And wares is merely the plural of ware.
I too never seen "warez" used to refer to anything other than pirated software. You make a good point about the derivation; it probably is directly from "software". Adding a superfluous Z to the end of a plural mass noun was also a characteristic of l33tspeak, as I recall.
This reminds me, my friend and I were the only people we knew who'd even used the internet in the late 90s so no one was around to correct us, and 3 of the apparently incorrect pronounciations we had agreed on were:
I do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set of credentials suffice?
I think, you don't get the full grasp of "early, friendly internet". Very few people do today. In my bubble - programming, for example, young people can't even imagine that there were times when you could focus on _things_ instead of writing layers of security code around them.
It makes me sad to think of all those simple little services we used to run on *NIX machines, like `finger` and `whois`. You'd never want to disclose that information now, but at the time it was quite nice to be able to see if a friend or colleague was around with a simple network query.
The GP is saying "I miss the days where I could easily exploit people" and the response was "I miss the days where we respected each other enough to not exploit each other". It wasn't naive or irresponsible, but reflective of a time with more trust, cooperation, and good intentions.
Reminds me of a few years ago, when I accidentally exposed my Domoticz install to the internet without authentication. I've had missed something in my Nginx config with X-Forwarded-For headers. After about a week or something apparently a foreign visitor came by my install and decided to have some good fun. Turning my lights on/off at random times. It took me about 3 days to realize what have happened, but in the mean time he didn't just destroy my install and only mess with me. Which was really sweet, because nuking the system would be far easier than opening the webpage every night.
That was a good and fun security lesson though and now I always check outside security with a mobile hotspot.
That’s like saying it would be naive and irresponsible for me to go outside without a life preserver today despite an unforeseen catastrophic global flood drowning the lands 10 years from now. It was a different world, with different expectations and frameworks.
That's like saying it's naive and irresponsible to gooutside without locking your front door when you live in a tiny remote village with 40 other people you've known for your whole life.
Some were open for uploads by design, in spirit of sharing things - essentially use the free space left after maib purpose to provide friendly mirrors for things like new projects etc. I recall using Archie to find copies of open source software at the ending edge of that era.
Some also were used as submissions for projects, long before sites like sourceforge started. Especially since plonking a bigger source dump on newsgroups wasn't exactly well received.
Sometimes people should be able to do nice things without it getting abused, no?
In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have something called a ‘buurtbieb’ aka a ‘neighborhood libraries’, which is a weatherproof cabinet where people can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood can borrow.
Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet to store candy, but why would you?
We have these throughout many neighborhoods in my city in central Florida, USA. We’re a college town so I just assumed it was somehow connected to that. Neat that it’s an international thing!
True, though to be fair most people never get to use private libraries. Or they used a library at their University that was technically private, but that gave access to the public as well. Public libraries are ubiquitous and very normal, while private libraries are the exception.
In America, public schools all have private libraries, reserved for attending students. (Maybe some operate as public libraries, but I've never seen nor heard of it.)
Furthermore, public libraries are not necessarily free. In America they virtually are all; fees only for late returns. But this is not globally true; in some parts of the world, libraries open to the public charge a fee for checking out books, or even require a fee for entry.
It's a normal elision, yes, we all picture a public library when we say "library". But "free library" isn't redundant or weird, because "public" is a modifier of library, not a trait.
People tend to call their personal library a "book collection" or the like, but it's a library, in just the same way that a Little Free Library is.
So most people who read have at least a small private library, whether they think of it in those terms or not.
There are two libraries near me that aren’t free - they charge an annual “membership” fee. One even operates more like an old blockbuster when it comes to newly released books. They charge a daily rental fee! It’s 25¢ a day, I believe.
Just keep using it as a generic name. They've already lost the generification war. Are they seriously going to track down and sue neighborhood libraries?
Good luck getting a jury to enforce the trademark.
Obligatory "Free as in beer vs. free as in freedom" comment. I have pulled stuff out of small community bookshelves that would never have seen their chance in a "professional-run" public library, both bad and good.
In Puerto Rico there are quite a few of these on the sidewalk and despite the rains they are generally always stocked with books. There are bars on everyone's windows and doors, but books piled up on the street.
there's one down the street from me but instead of books it has canned food. It says "little free pantry" on it. It must have been around for a while because the neighborhood it's in has long sense been gentrified and is populated with very well-off residents vs the working poor that use to live there.
