

_why oh _why - jbrhee
http://debu.gs/entries/why-oh-why-and-the-path-forward

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jbrhee
Raises interesting questions about preservation and archival. Would be
interested in hearing more on the angle of open-sourcing as a means for
increased productivity.

~~~
nglevin
It may be old news to you, but Kai Krause's "Software is merely a Performance
Art"[1] treads much the same territory, framing software as an ongoing
framework to influence future generations.

Open source can be a solution, but it's limited by bitrot; what it runs on,
and who or what is capable of interpreting it.

I feel there needs to be something else, haven't quite found out what that
might be.

[1] - <http://www.edge.org/response-detail/10113>

~~~
1337p337
Since _why's stuff was open, he addressed bitrot in his (brilliant) novella.
The article treats it some; the open-source remarks were about the code that
you don't see, that suffers from being under lock and key as well as bitrot.

~~~
nglevin
Yes, bitrot is _addressed_, but not resolved.

That's the source of my frustration whenever the open source solution is
brought up. It only works when there are hands present to maintain the source.

Which is much more effort than, say, writing a book and leaving it some place
to be rediscovered. Only the popular or the intensely niche seem to survive.

~~~
1337p337
Well, the Urbit essays (linked in the article) are one attempt to resolve it,
but bitrot still remains unresolved. I don't think I wrote anything indicating
otherwise. If it doesn't see the light of day, it dies; bitrot is a slower
death, but open source is a prerequisite to software not just disappearing
into the void. I'd really like to have presented a solution to bitrot, but I
don't have one.

------
secstate
First off, even a book can suffer from irrelevance, aside from being burned.
If twas not for the rosetta stone, vast carvings of hieroglyphs would have
remained largely locked to us.

But more importantly, I think _why's most recent incarnation is a nod to a
perceived solution. It's perhaps not 50 million years, but the persistence of
the internet and the protocols surrounding it may give us hope that document
stores can still be read in 100 or 200 years. Maybe the code wont run, but we
have the logic and the ability to decipher the language. Now, I'm just going
to go scribble out a Fortran to Python generator so we don't lose all those
handy formula translations :)

EDIT: I also bought a house from a former book collector inheriting a great
many old books. Aside from a 1787 edition of Virgil's Aeneid, I can tell you,
my ultimate frisbee stat collector from high school has an analog in the book
world. I'm staring at Oliver Onion's Poor Man's Tapestry, what a world shaker.

