I have a question for all the nerds

What is the open source and commercial software community doing to guarantee future digital compability of content created today?

Recently I tried to use a cd-rom from 1996, ironically by Bill Gates called The Road Ahead, and I was simply unable to use it as I do not have a windows 16 bit OS.

Coming at such a barrier a ton of different issues crossed my mind.

We as societies are becoming more and more digitally dependant, what guarantees us that we will be able to use todays material 50 years or more down the road?

I realize there are many technical issues ( changes in computer architecture and code ) and constant advancements that make this simply impossible to guarantee unless there is an active effort made to guarantee future compatibility ( aka backwards compatibility ).


I could say I came to the conclusion that open source may be the answer, as the commercial software community tends to not be convergent due to the fact it is not economically sane to collaborate with competitors.
There is also the issue that companies come and go ( in and out of business ), but the same can be said about the open source community and projects ( and anyone in the know is aware how many open source projects come and go ). So really who offers the most guarantees?

There's also political issues that could potentially arise in the future, like the usage of the Iso, Ascii standards ( which are European, and American created standards ) Unicode etc; changes in the definitions of the standards etc etc; the potential rise of emerging economies creating new independant standards etc etc


Sorry if my analysis is very childish and for the most part non factual but I was hoping some of you could help answer the question.


I know this sounds insane or perhaps paranoid on my part but one cannot ignore the facts that if nothing is done to guarantee future compatibility whole sectors of documentation, research etc will progressively disappear over time.

Or perhaps digital archeology might become a new field of study in the future



PS: Any reference material, links, basically ANYTHING on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

Last edited by jdat on Sep-03-2006 at 23:31

Compatibility isn't so much of a problem when you have access to the older hardware/source code.

Open source IS the answer itself to the problem, IMO. Commercial/Closed source is the problem.

The companies that provide the commercial software would have to support it forever to keep it up-to-date because nobody knows their software better than them. If they cease to exist as a company, then users will be left in the dark.

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"If she's old enough to crawl, she's already in position." -- Pedobear

The open source world will always find some way to convert archived data.
Take VHS --> DVD for example or audio tape --> CD.

I know those are more hardware examples but I think you get my point; there's always a way to build a better mousetrap.

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"...End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path...one that we all must take.
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass...and then you see it...
...white shores...and beyond...the far green country under a swift sunrise."

Although open source is a very tempting idea, it is not necessarily (sp?) the answer to issues of backwards compatibility. Remember that open source relies heavily on someone investing their time into a project that will not remunerate them in any way. I believe that backwards compatibility is not a big issue for technology because as long as there is a market for a company writing code that would enable such compatibility such a company will exists. Open source IMO is not the best answer because in the long run, everyone has to eat and keeping your source code available for everyone makes creating a bussiness model for your product very difficult. Because of that keeping your product up to date and/or competitive is always an uphill battle.

On the issue of companies coming and going, it is the same as with open source projects, if there is no demand for them, only a few enthusiasts keep them running. But if the problem you want addressed is as massive as keeping cultural material available for future societes i believe that there will be a demand and hence there will be open source projects/companies adressing said demand.

Lastly, if your concerned about research and whatnot, relevant research and documents are always moved into new technologies from what i can gather, and if not are always archived in more standards ways such as in html, pdf, and other document forms. Also, another reason why this is concern is not as grave as you think is that converting code from one standard to another is not a very complicated issue, specially from ASCII and UNICODE, and from image formats such as ISO. Actually you'll find that there is a barrage of programs that can open almost every imaginable format and in some cases convert them to other popular formats.

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Poetry>Byron//Blog>TheMean

quote:

Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

You want links?

*---> http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/orgact/storage.html
| Extremely informative link to an organization concerned with
| digital preservation. It is lengthy and covers many points. Highly
| recommended.
V

quote:

Backwards compatibility Description Being able to retain accessibility to a digital resource following upgrade to new software and/or operating systems. Advantages * Defers for a period the need for primary preservation strategies. * Is being offered by increasing number of vendors. Disadvantages * Is not routinely offered by all vendors. * Can only be of short- to medium-term value. * Even when it exists it cannot be expected to last indefinitely. * Its continued availability is dependent on market forces which are notoriously volatile. It may therefore cease to be available with little or no warning.

*--->http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwor...84&entry=102558
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V

quote:

Digital documents are far more evanescent than paper ones. Storage media become obsolete as technology progresses. Over the past twenty years alone, storage media have migrated from 5-inch floppies to 3.5-inch floppies to CDs to DVDs. Moreover, different word processing programs create documents in different formats. Thus, documents in relatively long-term storage such as the hard drives of servers can be read only by programs that have backwards compatibility. Such backwards compatibility may be difficult to achieve in 100 years because the developer of the program used to create the document may have gone out of business and the proprietary specifications of the document format may have disappeared. In contrast, documents created in ODF will remain accessible in the future because any programmer will be able to find its open, nonproprietary specifications. Requiring all Commonwealth employees to create documents in ODF will make it significantly easier for libraries to ensure that patrons 100 years from now will be able to read these historically important documents.

>>>This is one of the things being done. Companies have gone under in the past, it would be dangerous to assume that a company will exist forever. What happens when they don't leave us any source? As long as the source is archived properly and freely accessible, I believe we have nothing to worry about.

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"If she's old enough to crawl, she's already in position." -- Pedobear

Thanks for the all the replies!

So I guess the proper terms were Digital preservation and/or obsolescence.


And as I envisioned ( even if I didn't mention it when I created this thread ) digital preversations biggest issue and problem appears to be hardware :-/

Hey Jdat, is this issue solved or will I have to count how many terraflops you have??

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