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

Eleanor Lister eleanor at pacific.net.au
Mon Apr 2 13:12:54 AEST 2007


andrew clarke wrote:
> 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... ;-)

carved in into stone tablets?

"people, hear me!  i have 15, count them , 15 commandments ... ooops, i
have 10, 10 commandments ..."

serially, though, what can be guaranteed?  i suggest that we get as
techied up as we can, so that we can end up with a small crystal
containing molecularly encoded the entire works of the human race that
everyone has one of ... ubiquity might well be the only solution to
securing our information long term.

reflectively,
    EL  (brushes hair in reflection)

------------
Eleanor Ashley Lister
South Sydney Greens
http://ssg.nsw.greens.org.au
webmistress at ssg.nsw.greens.org.au




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