[LINK] Looking for some advice from the link 'brain'

[andrew clarke]

On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 11:19:53AM +1000, Karl Auer wrote:

> > non-technical  (i.e. management oriented) paper on why an open document 
> > format is a necessity to ensure that we can read old documents at some 
> > arbitrary point in the future.
> 
> It's not just the format, it's also the software and the hardware to run
> it. OpenOffice is not a solution as such, because it too will eventually
> disappear.

Of course, everything we create will disappear eventually, but...

With the advent of widely-distributed open source software, and open
source emulators (eg. DOSBox, QEMU and WINE) that have the ability to
run older software, I tend to think OpenOffice has a long future ahead. 
Meanwhile Microsoft and the other closed source software vendors have an
incentive to break file format compatibility with their old software
versions in order to discourage people using those old versions. 
(Sometimes I don't actually think this is all deliberate on their part,
but more down to poor design choices which end up being convenient for
their sales departments, but I digress...)

However, open source software generally has nothing to gain from this
behaviour, so good backward compatibility with file formats is usually
fairly common.

In any case it's usually not difficult to obtain old versions of open
source software, if the need arises - it's not as though you have to
scour eBay for OpenOffice 1.x because you lost your original CD.

And if you really need to, you can pay someone to patch the source code
to your requirements at some stage in the long-term future, which is
essentially impossible with closed source software.

I suppose I am preaching to the converted here, somewhat... ;-)