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It's pretty shameful that so little effort was apparently put into preserving these. Why bother doing this if they're going to just put them on a disk and let t

It's pretty shameful that so little effort was apparently put into preserving these. Why bother doing this if they're going to just put them on a disk and let them rot for 30 years. As data become more sophisticated it seems to be harder and harder to archive them in formats that aren't obsolete within a few years. I can go to The National Archives and look at a document that's nearly 1000 years old (or visit http://opendomesday.org/ http://opendomesday.org/ ), but the "new" version is unreadable less than 30 years later. What can be done about this? I'm assuming people must be investigating future-proof archival formats.

rwmj 11y ago
There were a lot of technical stumbling blocks to getting the data out, but the main problem was non-technical: Every child and adult who contributed has copyright on their works, and there are no records nor any copyright assignment. The main benefit of this project was in providing many valuable lessons in how badly things can go wrong :-(
- ascorbic 11y ago
  And it would have been such as easy problem to solve if someone had thought of it at the time. Plenty of open source projects have had to relearn this the hard way too. You need to insist on copyright assignment!
  - rwmj 11y ago
    You need to insist that contributions are licensed under some open source license, which is different from copyright assignment. You may or may not do copyright assignment as well, but many projects do not since it gives the assignee powers to relicense the work including taking it proprietary. Then there are "moral rights" which complicate things in some countries.
    - ascorbic 11y ago
      There aren't as far as I'm aware any open source licences that would allow the copyright holders to take existing work proprietary. Once it's released it can't be revoked. They'd only be able to do that to future work.
      - lordelph 11y ago
        A licence like a Creative Commons cc-by-sa is not exclusive, and allows the copyright holder to do what they like with their work. What they can't do is revoke the licence terms from anyone who chooses to exercise them. At best, the copyright holder can request removal of attribution. In another comment I mention the Geograph project which uses cc-by-sa. For some more background to that, I wrote about the reasons for selecting that licence to ensure long-term freedom of the archive here: http://www.geograph.org.uk/help/freedom http://www.geograph.org.uk/help/freedom
      - mintplant 11y ago
        If a project requires that contributors sign copyright over to a central party, that central party can later choose to release future versions under a proprietary license and profit off of others' past work. A project that does not require central copyright assignment and that receives sufficient outside contributions cannot have that happen, provided it's licensed under something like the (L)GPL. Copyright paralysis can be a feature rather than a bug.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        Yes and no. They can not take away rights granted to existing licensees. But the copyright holder can reissue the same work under whatever license they wish, without having to modify anything. What the comment you replied to point out is that if I release something under the GPL and then assign copyright to you, you can legally decide to relicense that code under a proprietary license so that the people buying it from me don't have to abide by the GPL. If I don't assign copyright, on the other hand, any such third parties would need my permission too.
        defiblep 11y ago
        Act of Parliament might do it. They did it for Peter Pan, after all. I wonder if it would stand a chance as a private members bill....
lordelph 11y ago
There's an interesting and detailed rebuttal to the question of whether they had properly considered the future archival from a team member here: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.44.html#subj7 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.44.html#subj7
frou_dh 11y ago
VERY relevant 2015 paper from Alan Kay et al: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf

rwmj 11y ago

There were a lot of technical stumbling blocks to getting the data out, but the main problem was non-technical: Every child and adult who contributed has copyright on their works, and there are no records nor any copyright assignment. The main benefit of this project was in providing many valuable lessons in how badly things can go wrong :-(

ascorbic 11y ago
And it would have been such as easy problem to solve if someone had thought of it at the time. Plenty of open source projects have had to relearn this the hard way too. You need to insist on copyright assignment!
- rwmj 11y ago
  You need to insist that contributions are licensed under some open source license, which is different from copyright assignment. You may or may not do copyright assignment as well, but many projects do not since it gives the assignee powers to relicense the work including taking it proprietary. Then there are "moral rights" which complicate things in some countries.
  - ascorbic 11y ago
    There aren't as far as I'm aware any open source licences that would allow the copyright holders to take existing work proprietary. Once it's released it can't be revoked. They'd only be able to do that to future work.
    - lordelph 11y ago
      A licence like a Creative Commons cc-by-sa is not exclusive, and allows the copyright holder to do what they like with their work. What they can't do is revoke the licence terms from anyone who chooses to exercise them. At best, the copyright holder can request removal of attribution. In another comment I mention the Geograph project which uses cc-by-sa. For some more background to that, I wrote about the reasons for selecting that licence to ensure long-term freedom of the archive here: http://www.geograph.org.uk/help/freedom http://www.geograph.org.uk/help/freedom
    - mintplant 11y ago
      If a project requires that contributors sign copyright over to a central party, that central party can later choose to release future versions under a proprietary license and profit off of others' past work. A project that does not require central copyright assignment and that receives sufficient outside contributions cannot have that happen, provided it's licensed under something like the (L)GPL. Copyright paralysis can be a feature rather than a bug.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Yes and no. They can not take away rights granted to existing licensees. But the copyright holder can reissue the same work under whatever license they wish, without having to modify anything. What the comment you replied to point out is that if I release something under the GPL and then assign copyright to you, you can legally decide to relicense that code under a proprietary license so that the people buying it from me don't have to abide by the GPL. If I don't assign copyright, on the other hand, any such third parties would need my permission too.
      - defiblep 11y ago
        Act of Parliament might do it. They did it for Peter Pan, after all. I wonder if it would stand a chance as a private members bill....

lordelph 11y ago

There's an interesting and detailed rebuttal to the question of whether they had properly considered the future archival from a team member here: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.44.html#subj7 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.44.html#subj7

frou_dh 11y ago

VERY relevant 2015 paper from Alan Kay et al: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf