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Heard about this ordeal on NPR a while back. It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures

Heard about this ordeal on NPR a while back. It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software. Especially with all the passion and work Tom put into the program and his work with multiple Rabbi's to tweak in their slight changes and localized traditions. This feels more like much needed historical preservation that the community could have guided. What a massive blunder of closed software.

kulahan 4y ago
As always, XKCD has touched on this [1]. 1: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
bombcar 4y ago
I've seen it multiple times; the sole company/developer often considers the software "their baby" and doesn't want to "let it go" for a number of potentially quite valid reasons, such as fear of loss of livelihood, disagreement with others on the direction, etc. Tarn Adams has a similar situation with DF. But hopefully they realize that at least having some sort of 'make available on death' could be valuable. We have already lost untold countless relatively custom software packages for niche markets that you've never heard of - and people just continue or go back to doing things by hand.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Last I heard Tarn Adams is considering open-sourcing at least parts of it in the long term now that they are more financially independent. The Steam launch was probably the best case scenario for both developer and community.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Yeah, and part of me wishes they did this years ago, but at the same time I can understand they wanted to keep it small on purpose; once you go public like on Steam, the dynamics change and you can't just bury your nose in code all day but you have to deal with finances, refunds, reviews, legalese, etc as well.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Software escrow exists for this reason. I was honestly surprised when I discovered it existed when a customer demanded it.
  - spydum 4y ago
    Yup, NCC group, of all people owns a big software escrow service they recently acquired from Iron Mountain.
    - Arch-TK 4y ago
      NCC has been doing escrow for a very long time before the Iron Mountain acquisition.
      - kjellsbells 4y ago
        Does escrow really work though? If the author of this software had placed a copy in escrow 25 years ago it is not clear to me that it would much use if the customer pulled it out in 2023 and tried to get it working. Access to the source, sure, but recreating the build chain on modern systems is not guaranteed to work at all. If someone told me they had escrowed 1998 vintage code and it was all mine to tinker with I would expect to find a CD with the release binaries, and a fat lump of a Visual SourceSafe database that expected NT4, some ancient C compiler (or worse, some VB5 runtime and a plethora of random DLLs) and who knows what level of deep magic to resurrect. And thats assuming I could even find hardware to run the OS of the build machine. Lord help you if there any kind of copy protection dongle nonsense going on, as was popular back then.
        Arch-TK 4y ago
        I don't work in that department so I can't tell you the exact process, but this is how it was explained to me: The goal of escrow is to have people not only understand the toolchain and ensure that they can get it working at the time when the software is put into escrow and then document it, but to also periodically pull it out of the archives and verify it can still be built. As part of escrow, steps are taken to ensure that any additional necessary software and hardware is kept to support this. That's what you're paying for with something like NCC's escrow service. If you want I can actually just ask my colleagues tomorrow.
- andybak 4y ago
  DF=Dwarf Fortress Please type things out in full so other people don't have to use a search engine just to follow along.
  - Woberto 4y ago
    iykyk
  - aew4ytasghe5 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - andybak 4y ago
      Rather ironic you bothered to reply, then. I actually think readability matters and I wasn't rude. What's your excuse?
    - cnlevy 4y ago
      Yours is a perfect example of a recursive comment
    - watwut 4y ago
      It added something useful - I now know what DF is without having to google the acronym.
- praptak 4y ago
  Tarn Adams has this base covered: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyjam3/what-will-happen-to-gamings-most-ambitious-experiment-when-its-creators-die https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyjam3/what-will-happen-to-g...
wvenable 4y ago
This a bit of generational divide -- I think as more developers, even those starting out later in life, just live with open source software as the norm the more of them will just consider opening their code now or when in inevitable happens. I think we take for granted the obviousness of open sourcing something and having a community potentially continue development when you're gone.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Does Github have a feature to just switch all my private repositories to public when I die?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    There is a feature to nominate a successor who can do certain things to your repositories when you die.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Yeah, I just want to avoid having to bother anyone.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    Feature proposal: it should display the comparison between the cost of licensing the software, and the cost of hiring a hitman.
  - scarby2 4y ago
    This would be a useful feature. Though how will it know when you die?
    - chucksmash 4y ago
      Telegram allows you to auto-delete your account after a configurable number of months of inactivity. That neatly side steps the "how to prove someone is dead" problem.
bsder 4y ago
> It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software. It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth the money. Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network connections). https://www.douglassassociates.com/ https://www.douglassassociates.com/ It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls, managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due to the OS makers breaking shit. They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However, that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the programming AND ballroom dance competition experience necessary to keep it going.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  $300K/yr isn't a labor of love, it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership. Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it. "Garbage network connections" are trivial to deal with with modern web app practices.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    What an amazing jump to go from software that is clearly desirable enough that people are paying for it to "skimming money" and "corrupt leadership". To take issues THAT STILL EXIST in 80%+ of software and call them "trivial". Yes, the tools to build this product and make it function obviously exist. If you can do it cheaper, then do it and undercut him! I don't think you want to handle billing, support (for VERY non-tech savvy groups) and build and customize the software fulltime for <300k revenue (not profit!). Especially not at the "$1k a client project" price. Anyone can crank out a webform, very few people can integrate software into a client and have the client continue to want to pay them! Accusing someone, without merit, of skimming and corruption is bordering in the libel territory. Doing it in this case is also rude and shows a lack of experience.
calebio 4y ago
FWIW it may need a patch to make it actually work. From the article it seems like it attempts to connect to a non-existent web service on startup. Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course. Just wanted to point out that it may run but not work as expected without changes.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course. Or patch it to skip that check.
discardable_dan 4y ago
It seems even worse than that: the fevered dream of of a single person, leaving behind incomprehensible 5mil+ program shaped around custom coding practices that others wouldn't understand and would struggle to modernize. (For reference, the linux kernel is ~8mil.) Even open sourced, it's likely it would be hard to maintain or extend without that intimate knowledge.
- layer8 4y ago
  LLMs might become helpful here.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  THIS. "Open Source" removes one of many barriers to the code being well-maintained over time. "I'm sure that somebody qualified will step up and..." is exactly the sort of wishful thinking that got them into the current mess.
kodah 4y ago
> Heard about this ordeal on NPR a while back. It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software. I don't even think this necessarily has to do with open sourcing necessarily. This is a wider software conundrum as well. From the article: > The first warning Shepard got was when she went to update her Mac, and the system warned her that TropeTrainer wouldn’t run on the newest OS Operating System updates frequently break software. Operating System transitions break software a lot. This is a thorny issue, imo, because on the one hand when people buy software I doubt they're thinking about how it'll be useless if the Operating System's company (or community) think they can do better with new APIs and behavior. On the other hand, updates are part of moving something as vast as an OS forward, and at least some amount of the time they're necessary. Windows provides some ways of running older software in a VM. I'd be curious if they've tried such a thing with this software. MacOS I'm not so sure of, since even the ISOs are somewhat controlled.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Yes you can get very old software running in Windows using various compatibility tools. Like isn't it possible to get Windows 3.1 software running on the latest releases of Windows? There's definitely just a setting in Windows 10 to run compatibility modes back to Vista. Earlier versions of windows that can be run in HyperV can go further back. Not so much MacOS after a few years, though they did release Rosetta and Rosetta 2 to handle the transitions to and away from Intel processors.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    The only way you can get win311 software working on win10 is to install the 32 bit version (aside from emulation). Not sure win 11 has a 32 bit version. Also win311 apps can be wildly picky what sort of dlls are installed. So your mileage can vary.
    - theodric 4y ago
      There are workarounds, e.g. http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html
raggi 4y ago
I know, it’s amazing how Debian still uses isc dhcpc, what a massive blunder of open source software. A little tongue in cheek, and I know off mainline maintenance exists, but it’s still the same ordeal - oft presented with a different tone of backdrop.

kulahan 4y ago

As always, XKCD has touched on this [1]. 1: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

bombcar 4y ago

I've seen it multiple times; the sole company/developer often considers the software "their baby" and doesn't want to "let it go" for a number of potentially quite valid reasons, such as fear of loss of livelihood, disagreement with others on the direction, etc. Tarn Adams has a similar situation with DF. But hopefully they realize that at least having some sort of 'make available on death' could be valuable. We have already lost untold countless relatively custom software packages for niche markets that you've never heard of - and people just continue or go back to doing things by hand.

alpaca128 4y ago
Last I heard Tarn Adams is considering open-sourcing at least parts of it in the long term now that they are more financially independent. The Steam launch was probably the best case scenario for both developer and community.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Yeah, and part of me wishes they did this years ago, but at the same time I can understand they wanted to keep it small on purpose; once you go public like on Steam, the dynamics change and you can't just bury your nose in code all day but you have to deal with finances, refunds, reviews, legalese, etc as well.
RajT88 4y ago
Software escrow exists for this reason. I was honestly surprised when I discovered it existed when a customer demanded it.
- spydum 4y ago
  Yup, NCC group, of all people owns a big software escrow service they recently acquired from Iron Mountain.
  - Arch-TK 4y ago
    NCC has been doing escrow for a very long time before the Iron Mountain acquisition.
    - kjellsbells 4y ago
      Does escrow really work though? If the author of this software had placed a copy in escrow 25 years ago it is not clear to me that it would much use if the customer pulled it out in 2023 and tried to get it working. Access to the source, sure, but recreating the build chain on modern systems is not guaranteed to work at all. If someone told me they had escrowed 1998 vintage code and it was all mine to tinker with I would expect to find a CD with the release binaries, and a fat lump of a Visual SourceSafe database that expected NT4, some ancient C compiler (or worse, some VB5 runtime and a plethora of random DLLs) and who knows what level of deep magic to resurrect. And thats assuming I could even find hardware to run the OS of the build machine. Lord help you if there any kind of copy protection dongle nonsense going on, as was popular back then.
      - Arch-TK 4y ago
        I don't work in that department so I can't tell you the exact process, but this is how it was explained to me: The goal of escrow is to have people not only understand the toolchain and ensure that they can get it working at the time when the software is put into escrow and then document it, but to also periodically pull it out of the archives and verify it can still be built. As part of escrow, steps are taken to ensure that any additional necessary software and hardware is kept to support this. That's what you're paying for with something like NCC's escrow service. If you want I can actually just ask my colleagues tomorrow.
andybak 4y ago
DF=Dwarf Fortress Please type things out in full so other people don't have to use a search engine just to follow along.
- Woberto 4y ago
  iykyk
- aew4ytasghe5 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - andybak 4y ago
    Rather ironic you bothered to reply, then. I actually think readability matters and I wasn't rude. What's your excuse?
  - cnlevy 4y ago
    Yours is a perfect example of a recursive comment
  - watwut 4y ago
    It added something useful - I now know what DF is without having to google the acronym.
praptak 4y ago
Tarn Adams has this base covered: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyjam3/what-will-happen-to-gamings-most-ambitious-experiment-when-its-creators-die https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyjam3/what-will-happen-to-g...

wvenable 4y ago

This a bit of generational divide -- I think as more developers, even those starting out later in life, just live with open source software as the norm the more of them will just consider opening their code now or when in inevitable happens. I think we take for granted the obviousness of open sourcing something and having a community potentially continue development when you're gone.

Aeolun 4y ago
Does Github have a feature to just switch all my private repositories to public when I die?
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  There is a feature to nominate a successor who can do certain things to your repositories when you die.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Yeah, I just want to avoid having to bother anyone.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  Feature proposal: it should display the comparison between the cost of licensing the software, and the cost of hiring a hitman.
- scarby2 4y ago
  This would be a useful feature. Though how will it know when you die?
  - chucksmash 4y ago
    Telegram allows you to auto-delete your account after a configurable number of months of inactivity. That neatly side steps the "how to prove someone is dead" problem.

bsder 4y ago

> It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software. It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth the money. Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network connections). https://www.douglassassociates.com/ https://www.douglassassociates.com/ It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls, managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due to the OS makers breaking shit. They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However, that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the programming AND ballroom dance competition experience necessary to keep it going.

hgsgm 4y ago
$300K/yr isn't a labor of love, it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership. Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it. "Garbage network connections" are trivial to deal with with modern web app practices.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  What an amazing jump to go from software that is clearly desirable enough that people are paying for it to "skimming money" and "corrupt leadership". To take issues THAT STILL EXIST in 80%+ of software and call them "trivial". Yes, the tools to build this product and make it function obviously exist. If you can do it cheaper, then do it and undercut him! I don't think you want to handle billing, support (for VERY non-tech savvy groups) and build and customize the software fulltime for <300k revenue (not profit!). Especially not at the "$1k a client project" price. Anyone can crank out a webform, very few people can integrate software into a client and have the client continue to want to pay them! Accusing someone, without merit, of skimming and corruption is bordering in the libel territory. Doing it in this case is also rude and shows a lack of experience.

calebio 4y ago

FWIW it may need a patch to make it actually work. From the article it seems like it attempts to connect to a non-existent web service on startup. Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course. Just wanted to point out that it may run but not work as expected without changes.

phkahler 4y ago
>> Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course. Or patch it to skip that check.

discardable_dan 4y ago

It seems even worse than that: the fevered dream of of a single person, leaving behind incomprehensible 5mil+ program shaped around custom coding practices that others wouldn't understand and would struggle to modernize. (For reference, the linux kernel is ~8mil.) Even open sourced, it's likely it would be hard to maintain or extend without that intimate knowledge.

layer8 4y ago
LLMs might become helpful here.
bell-cot 4y ago
THIS. "Open Source" removes one of many barriers to the code being well-maintained over time. "I'm sure that somebody qualified will step up and..." is exactly the sort of wishful thinking that got them into the current mess.

kodah 4y ago

> Heard about this ordeal on NPR a while back. It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software. I don't even think this necessarily has to do with open sourcing necessarily. This is a wider software conundrum as well. From the article: > The first warning Shepard got was when she went to update her Mac, and the system warned her that TropeTrainer wouldn’t run on the newest OS Operating System updates frequently break software. Operating System transitions break software a lot. This is a thorny issue, imo, because on the one hand when people buy software I doubt they're thinking about how it'll be useless if the Operating System's company (or community) think they can do better with new APIs and behavior. On the other hand, updates are part of moving something as vast as an OS forward, and at least some amount of the time they're necessary. Windows provides some ways of running older software in a VM. I'd be curious if they've tried such a thing with this software. MacOS I'm not so sure of, since even the ISOs are somewhat controlled.

colechristensen 4y ago
Yes you can get very old software running in Windows using various compatibility tools. Like isn't it possible to get Windows 3.1 software running on the latest releases of Windows? There's definitely just a setting in Windows 10 to run compatibility modes back to Vista. Earlier versions of windows that can be run in HyperV can go further back. Not so much MacOS after a few years, though they did release Rosetta and Rosetta 2 to handle the transitions to and away from Intel processors.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  The only way you can get win311 software working on win10 is to install the 32 bit version (aside from emulation). Not sure win 11 has a 32 bit version. Also win311 apps can be wildly picky what sort of dlls are installed. So your mileage can vary.
  - theodric 4y ago
    There are workarounds, e.g. http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html

raggi 4y ago

I know, it’s amazing how Debian still uses isc dhcpc, what a massive blunder of open source software. A little tongue in cheek, and I know off mainline maintenance exists, but it’s still the same ordeal - oft presented with a different tone of backdrop.