I was so surprised when I first knew GeoCities. Its get-paid-by-advertisement business model of free web page hosting looked interesting. I thought that type of business will continuously be growing. (This impression was not exactly true, as many of the free sites have been shut down.)
Later, I signed up for GeoCities Japan for my web pages, partly because it is the first free web hosting I know, partly because the site looked coolest in the free hosting services at that time, and partly because I thought I would change my ISP in the future (and I actually did; currently I'm using fourth ISP since then,) but I didn't want to change URLs of my pages.
I took about two month to prepare for the first set of pages here, http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-PaloAlto/9700/. The pages were dedicated for FreeBSD fe driver.
After I announced the opening of the fe driver page, I regularly added or updated the pages once per a week or two. However, as I had written everything I wanted to say about the driver, and the fe driver was stabilized and almost be frozen, I was losing my initial passion to build the web site. The update interval got longer and longer, and, in Nov. 1999, the site run out of steam.
Time flew, hackers worked, and FreeBSD evolved. When I was in stasis, other contributers to FreeBSD project wrote new codes or made new experiments, and the information on my pages had been out of date.
Even when I was off from the FreeBSD activities, I was receiving emails; some said problems of the driver, some suggested (possible) modifications, and some taught more about new boards. On the other hand, GeoCities says in its charter that a user who didn't update any of his/her web pages more than three months would be kicked out, and I actually didn't update anything for about nine months, but GeoCities showed its generousness that it didn't remove my account.
On September 2000, I restarted updating the pages.
Since then, I expanded the subject of my pages to cover something other than fe driver. With relatively slow pace, I was adding more contents to the pages. It was fun.
On early October, 2001, GeoCities Japan announced its revised guidelines. Basically, the new guidelines give GeoCities Japan rights to copy, modify and/or sell users' contents without any permission by the author. Several users blamed for it. However, I don't care about it; I had no intention to keep contents on my page under strict property right, anyway. The point I can't live with is that GeoCities have a right to modify my works and distribute the modified versions under my name. I just can't stand it.
More precisely, I don't care whether somebody modifies my work, whether somebody distributes my work, or whether somebody modifies my work and distributes it under his/her name. That's no problem with me. What I can't stand is the possibility that something I'm not comfortable is distributed under my name and I'm not allowed to protest against it.
So, I removed all my pages on the site before the new guidelines takes effect.
I have been having my pages on GeoCities Japan for more than three years. It's too bad that I have to leave. However, that's life.
Thank you for reading. I will be back to the Internet again soon, probably on another site. See you there.