RareWares
RareWares started in 2001 as a very simple (and ugly - you can check the original HTML here. Of course, all links are dead by now) AAC download point. At that time Dolby was actively hunting sited allowing free distribution of unlicensed AAC binaries, and I abused a legal loophole in the brazilian legislation. Here, foreign software patents have no value. Back then I had only a handful of visitors per day.
After some time, I teamed up with John Edwards (John33, of OggDropXPd fame) and I started
hosting his compiles of bleeding-edge Vorbis versions, and his own modded versions of
OggDrop and oggenc.
RareWares was then hosted at my university server. Visits and bandwidth consumption started
to grow fast, and eventually the server gave up. Thankfully Dibrom, administrator and owner
of HydrogenAudio, offered some space at his server. By then, visits were going past 1000
per day.
Soon after moving to HydrogenAudio, Michael Gan (xmixahlx) joined the team and started
maintaining a full featured Debian repository in our server.
Due to it's continuous growth, RareWares once again moved. Chris Calmer (ScorLibran) was kind
enough to donate the hosting space and bandwidth, and Radu Popescu (rpop) gave me the
rarewares.org domain.
Today RareWares home page is viewed more than 2 thousand times per day, pumps more than 100Gb of data per month, and is close to reaching 10000000 visitors since it's creation.