Playboy Hosted Mirrors

I went to download Apache Tomcat the other day, and was amused to see one of the mirror site selections on the download page was "http://mirrors.playboy.com/apache". Was it a joke? Nope - it's real: http://mirrors.playboy.com exists, and in addition to Apache, it provides downloads for CPAN, FreeBSD, Fedora and mod_ssl. According to the admin:

This is an unsupported open source mirror utilizing hardware and network bandwidth generously provided by Playboy Enterprises, Inc. This server is located in Chicago, IL, USA.

...Playboy's resident tech nerds would like to thank the authors, contributors, bug testers, and everyone else involved in the Open Source software we use on a daily basis. THANK YOU!

But I wonder... maybe there's an ulterior motive? Maybe an attempt to get big companies that are blocking employee access to "playboy.com" to open it up? "Come on boss, you told me to upgrade the Fedora boxes!"

And if it's not blocked at your company, but somebody's watching access logs somewhere, you better watch out...

Boss: Johnson! This report from IT says you've been downloading a lot from "playboy.com"!

You: No, boss, you don't understand - I was just checking out the latest Tomcat!

Boss: I'll just bet you were!

You: No, no, no - it's open source!

Boss: Yes, that's how it was in the 60's too, my lad. Why I remember this one girl, Sunflower I think her name was...

You: Um, are you going to fire me or what?

Boss: Fire you? No, no, I guess not this time. But I am curious, Johnson; the URL says "mirrors" and "apache"... what is that? Some kind of kinky "Girls of the Reservation" or something? I've never seen that in the magazine...

Kidding aside, this is a pretty cool way for these open source users to give back to the community - kudos and thanks to those resident tech nerds. But I can't help thinking, if they really want to reward all the open source hackers (the male ones, anyway), they'd give away more of playboy.com than bandwidth...

Also, Playboy is a good start, but there are other similar sites running Linux, Apache, andFreeBSD.

Well, enjoy this new download site, and as Bjørn Hansen says, you can always claim "I read it for the source code."