7 ms·
> people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums have the kind of longevity that just isn’t aff
by cooper12 11y ago
> people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums have the kind of longevity that just isn’t afforded to modern digital apps.
This line stood out to me the most. Along with payment issues, one of the larger issues is bitrot. What if Windows phones gets a 99% market share next year? That's 99% of users who will never be able to play Hogarth's game because it was never ported. Even if we put aside proactive adaption, there's also an issue of the code stagnating in relation to its environment. Entire architectures might change such as Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel, or requirements might get tighter like sandboxing in the app store or the recent SPI mechanism that protects system files. Sure you might have emulators but that mostly relegates the software for later generations with more powerful hardware; to be played with nostalgia rather than in the moment.
I don't know what the solution is, but we definitely need to do something to preserve these kinds of things for the future, like how the Internet Archive is breathing new life into MS-DOS games using in-browser emulation. [0] For one thing we need to preserve the binaries of games like these in case they do go down, and related to that, the specific software versions they ran on. (I'm contradicting myself here because these are the only non-radical approaches I see right now as opposed to something like a reserve for source code to be released when it enters the public domain).
[0]: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
- egeozcan 11y agoWe already had a lot of architectural transitions throughout the computer history (a very small part of which I witnessed) and we could emulate nearly all of the deprecated architectures quite well. I am optimistic that it can be repeated.
- silon7 11y agoNot when you have companies forcing online registration, expiring software, cloud services/storage, DRM, ...
- egeozcan 11y agoYes, that is also a concern. One can only hope that when they turn into abandonware, those software will be "freed" ("cracked" but legally, although IANAL) by the community.
- creshal 11y agoThere's no legal concept of abandonware, and even redistributing it is illegal. It's just that, well, it's abandoned because nobody wants to take legal responsibility right now. That situation can still change when a copyright holder sells it to a patent/copyright troll later.
- egeozcan 11y agoThanks for the clarification. I falsely assumed abandonware as public domain. I also found some explanation about the public domain here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/72916 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/72916
- creshal 11y agoThere's also the small problem that not all countries have a concept of a copyright in the first place. Quite a few EU nations have laws around the concept of Authors' Rights instead. Public domain does not even exist for those (because there is always an author, and authors always have rights to their work, even if they're publishing anonymously).
- icebraining 11y agoAt least here in Portugal, while we do have Author's Rights (which include moral rights) instead of copyright, they still expire to Public Domain, and I believe the same is true for most EU nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_l...
- tetraodonpuffer 11y agonot if SAAS becomes the standard way of doing things, you can't emulate what you don't have, if all we're going to end up using are thin clients to cloud-based software once it's gone it's gone forever