29 Aug
2011
29 Aug
'11
4:51 p.m.
On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:09:28AM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
On 8/29/11 8:40 AM, William Donzelli wrote:
Who toss legacy hardware support at an alarming rate because it's too much
work. Linux is an extreme example of this. NetBSD pretty much the opposite.
Well, so you run an older version. Just because the new version of the kernel
doesn't support old hardware doesn't mean that the old version of the
codebase magically disappears.
Also
sufficient: source code. Open source has an unconquerable advantage
here, over proprietary.
I do not have complete faith about this in the long term. The open
source folks tend to be a loose group of undisciplined volunteers,
generally not long term thinkers, with only a very small segment
interested in historic preservation.
They also thrash on the 'fun' parts of systems
(GNOME/KDE look and feel)
Well, one doesn't _have_ to use KDE/GNOME. I've been using the same GUI
setup now for 12+ years: X + windowmaker + $BROWSER + a metric ton of
xterms. Still works just fine ;-)
and don't bother with the dirty, un-fun parts of
making systems stable
for the real world.
I don't know how far back they ever found it, but Stallman/FSF were hunting
for GNU distributions because they didn't have a complete archive of what
they had released.
Yeah, looks like in the early days nobody really bothered to keep archives
around. But the official hosting site for the Linux kernel (kernel.org)
still keeps the source for the Linux kernel v1.0 around (building and running
it, however, are a different animal).
I also don't agree that modern software systems
are in a better state to
be preserved. In the 'old days' you could get a shrink-wrapped package that
was the entire deal, docs, and media. Today, it's a blob that comes off the
web and gets patched very frequently, as well as potentially being tied to
the mother-ship to be functional. There are dozens (hundreds?) of products
now that are devices that were tethered to dead back-end services
(Danger Sidekick). How do you even start to preserve this?
And then there are software packages that only work when they can talk
to activation servers run by the company selling the software. Good luck
with that 20 years down the road.
The direction the world is heading with computers is
making it very, very
difficult to preserve.
Unfortunately, yes.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison