
When a dev dies, their apps should live on - akakievich
http://www.stuff.tv/features/when-dev-dies-their-apps-should-live
======
ransom1538
There are huge issues with current tech and death. Basically. If you die:

1) Your family (might) need your bank info, passwords, insurance policy
information, asset lists. They are all doing this, while, their favorite tech
guy... is dead.

2) Where are your docs? Kids want these. Journals (evernote), writings
(dropbox), stories (jira), just anything. Old iphone photos, strange 3.5
disks, etc. As time goes these are deleted, lost or most of the time: never
known about.

3) What about all the things you _don 't_ want found? Old contracts,
xgirlfriend notes, company transcripts, etc. Welp, I hope you remembered to
encrypt your disks, well, that would mess up 1) & 2). Whatever.

~~~
dheera
Encrypting your disks will only keep people from reading them for a century or
two. Technology from the future will be able to break today's encryption in a
heartbeat, whether it's simple Moore's Law, quantum computing, cryptographic
loopholes in today's algorithms, or something else entirely. So if historians
from the future care about you, nothing you leave behind will be truly safe.

If you really want to mess with people from the future, do what Beale did,
make up a bunch of bogus stuff, and throw it in with all your encrypted
documents.

~~~
zeveb
> Technology from the future will be able to break today's encryption in a
> heartbeat

I don't believe that's necessarily true. IIRC, certain algorithms would
require computations involving every particle in the universe, operating for
billions of years, to brute-force, provided that they are not actually broken.
_Will_ every current algorithm eventually be broken? Probably—but if not, they
should be good.

~~~
level
Many of our current encryption algorithms can be broken by sufficiently
powerful quantum computers [1]. We're still a while off from usable quantum
computers, but they are coming, eventually.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
quantum_cryptography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography)

~~~
monort
Symmetric key encryption is resistant to quantum computing, you just need to
double the key size

------
cooper12
> 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
We 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
Not when you have companies forcing online registration, expiring software,
cloud services/storage, DRM, ...

~~~
egeozcan
Yes, 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
There'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
Thanks 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
There'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
At 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_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_lengths)

~~~
creshal
Authors' Rights expire, but (at least in Germany and Austria) you cannot
_voluntarily_ put a work into public domain before and give up your rights on
it, like you can under the US concept of Public Domain.

------
steve371
On a more wider subject, I always wonder what happens to the developers just
simply disappeared.

Phone apps, browser add-ons, you may only notice something happens when it
stopped working.

Then you go to the forum, you go to the blog, there may be some rumors. There
would be some people trying to pick up and carry on. But, sometimes, no one
knows what really happens.

No emails has been responded from that weird email address ever since, no
activities from that account.

Finally, you may go to tweak that apps you loved so much yourself. Or when you
are lazy, you will try to find an alternative and accept it. But the question
is still hanging in your head.

------
Udo
If you want your stuff to live on, there is an easy fix. You can set up your
will so some or all of your stuff will be uploaded to a public place, such as
GitHub or whatever. Or you can ask a friend to go through your digital
possessions and use their own judgement regarding what to do with it.

Simply doing nothing and expecting app stores to come up with something like
memorialized accounts is not going to work. The "best" they can do is delete
your apps faster when notice of your death comes in.

If you're writing a will anyway, why not just include a clause about the data
on your hard drives? Arguably, including a "data will" is probably more
important to your legacy than the boring minutiae of how to split up your bank
account.

------
cableshaft
This becomes so much more apparent when you work for an app startup (or
downloadable console game publisher) that shuts down. The games I put hundreds
of hours into while working for those companies have disappeared from their
corresponding downloadable stores after only two years.

I still have copies of them on my devices and on my computer, and there's
still a few copies floating around in torrent-land, and there's still a few
videos and a couple reviews out there, but for the most part it's already
difficult to see any evidence that those games ever existed.

In contrast, the Flash games I made on my own you can still access from about
2000 websites, including my own and Newgrounds, over a full decade later.
Although even that is going to be a problem soon now that Flash is on its way
out.

How the hell can a game developer keep up with this? I decided I can't, and
coincidentally I got into board game design anyway, so now I spend more of my
time working on board game designs. If those get published, then there will be
many hard copies out there, and if they're popular enough, either myself or
another company will develop a video game version of them, so they can exist
in both mediums.

And you don't need to keep up with the latest tech to make sure your board
games survive for decades, even hundreds of years. For me, this satisfies my
preservation itch a lot more than the current state of digital preservation,
which seems in terrible condition for modern games.

Hopefully the retro game emulation scene can keep up with the demands of it
all. I'm thankful they allow me to play SNES games that would cost me $100+ to
get a physical copy today, a physical copy that is not guaranteed to work on
my machine (I bought a few SNES cartridges that didn't work recently).

------
ljf
I remember being so sad when Dan died:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20050814083139/http://www.danb.di...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050814083139/http://www.danb.dircon.co.uk/hg/hg.htm)

He wasn't a real world friend, but we'd spoken via email a few times and I was
in love with the game he'd written. He had really big plans for it, but sadly
it died with him, and doesn't seem to be playable now without digging out an
old browser and versions of java.

This was the days before github - I can only imagine that today this project
and his others could have lived on in some way.

------
lbradstreet
I would love to see a similar proposition with proprietary products run by
companies.

If you run an infrastructure style product, there should be a living will
involve where the product will become open source upon the bankruptcy or
shutdown style sale of the company.

For example, FoundationDB was bought by apple and the product was shuttered.
Under a living will, the product would become open source, as it is no longer
developed by the company.

I realise this may lead to a lower selling price, all things being equal,
however people/companies are also more likely to trust you when you are small,
as they have a greater chance of survival should you fail.

My personal feeling is that most of these products should be open source from
the get go, and it will probably have to be this way going forward, however
this is a reasonable middle ground.

~~~
s73v3r
"For example, FoundationDB was bought by apple and the product was shuttered.
Under a living will, the product would become open source, as it is no longer
developed by the company."

Would it? I assume the tech is still being developed. It's just that the
continuing development is not offered as a product.

Further, once someone buys the company, don't they gain control over that
company's assets? So if they no longer want to offer a product for sale, why
should they?

~~~
lbradstreet
In theory there should be a trade off when offering such a solution. Companies
are more likely to trust you, and use your product if they can be sure there
is a fallback plan (open source) upon your product being shuttered. Yes, you
may lose some potential fallback plans for your company if it is being bought
for its technology, but hopefully the number of additional adopters who would
trust you early on in your company's life would compensate for this.

I'm not saying there is a moral obligation to do so, merely that it might be a
good decision for both sides. See, for example, how open source is
increasingly becoming a requirement for infrastructure products that companies
come to depend on. This may be a good middle ground. Personally think open
sourcing from the start is a better choice.

------
georgeecollins
The idea expressed in the title is a kind of hell. Think how hard it would be
for all of us if we were obligated to maintain every app past the lifetime of
its creators.

Software dies. Maybe there will be some OS code that runs for a hundred years.
But I think every application is going to die that doesn't have some cult like
group of fans who maintain it, probably mostly for sentimental reasons.

------
mendelk
Perhaps it might be appropriate to link to these:

Get Your Shit Together[0], and related discussion[1]

[0] [http://getyourshittogether.org/](http://getyourshittogether.org/) [1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934)

------
LoSboccacc
well the article identified but failed to address both of the core issues:
copyright and who pays for it.

but most importantly failed to mention or aknowledge this
[https://archive.org/details/internetarcade](https://archive.org/details/internetarcade)
which is doing exactly what he vouches for, preserving memory (especially
relevant since he's talking about a game)

