scarcity of digital preservation efforts - was Re: eBay... Yikes!

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. They also thrash on the 'fun' parts of systems (GNOME/KDE look and feel) 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. I had looked at the problem of archiving open source projects for CHM and couldn't get my head around what to consider important. Sourceforge was filled with half-baked abandoned projects, and now I don't even know where to start with the half-baked abandoned web sites trying to be Sourceforge. 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? The direction the world is heading with computers is making it very, very difficult to preserve.