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Preventing the New Dark Ages: Start Here
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| Incidentally, that previous blog entry reminds me: people regularly ask
| me, "well, why don't you use (Windows | Microsoft Office | [insert program
| here)? Everybody else does, and it would make your life so much easier." Or
| they ask me "why bother using Linux? It's so much easier to use Windows." And
| so on.
|
| [...]
|
| Thirdly, they're both open source projects and thus the developers have no
| incentive to lock me in so that they can charge me rent. I don't mind paying
| for software; where an essential piece of free software has a tipjar on the
| developer's website, I will on occasion use it. And I'm writing this screed
| on a Mac, running OS/X; itself a proprietary platform. But the software I use
| for my work is open — because these projects are technology driven rather
| than marketing driven, so they've got no motivation to lock me in and no
| reason to force me onto a compulsory (and expensive) upgrade treadmill.
|
| I'll make exceptions to this personal policy if no tool exists for the job
| that meets my criteria — but given a choice between a second-rate tool that
| doesn't try to steal my data and blackmail me into paying rent and a
| first-rate tool that locks me in, I'll take the honest one every time. And
| I'll make a big exception to it for activities that don't involve acts of
| creation on my part. I see no reason not to use proprietary games consoles,
| or ebook readers that display files in a non-extractable format (as opposed
| to DRM, which is just plain evil all of the time). But if I created a work I
| damn well own it, and I'll go back to using a manual typewriter if necessary,
| rather than let a large corporation pry it from my possession and charge me
| rent for access to it.
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http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/dark_ages_start_here.html
Related:
It's the data, stupid
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| I know ODF works and a key point is that there should not be competing
| standards. I also suspect that some of the extreme obfuscation within the
| OOXML format is part of a longer term vendor lock-in plan. Now, the question
| is how to deal with this in my advocacy. The story I tell is this…
|
| “I went to retrieve a word processor document I’d written several years
| before. Actually, quite a long time back, as I had been produced on a
| freeware DOS word processor. I managed to find a PC with a 5.25 inch floppy
| disk drive, and copied the file over. But I didn’t have the program. I opened
| the file in a editor and discovered that it was a mess. Weird characters all
| over the place. I had lost my work.”
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http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/community_posts/its_data_stupid
The Guest Perspective: Data for the Next Generations
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| These archives have proven their value -- for example, scientists are still
| using data archives from the Voyager missions of the 1970s. The concept of
| archiving is simple, but to do it right, there is much to be considered.
|
| [...]
|
| Preserving data for the future is a challenge for everyone. Many of us have
| old floppy disks containing documents we'd like to be able to use at some
| point, but what will happen when we try to load those documents in 2010,
| especially if some of files were written with programs from 1995?
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http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspectives/piPerspective_11_7_2007.php
Warning of data ticking time bomb
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| The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking
| time bomb", the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.
|
| Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of
| critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file
| formats.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm
British Library calls for digital copyright action
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| In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference
| in Manchester, the United Kingdom's national library warned that the
| country's traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully
| recognize digital content.
|
| "Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize
| the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass,"
| Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, told ZDNet
| UK.
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http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6119043.html
Publish And Perish
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| Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now
| Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information.
| "If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs
| look the same?" he asks. "The Mac or the PC--will they be around?
| If they are, what about the software? " So far there's no business
| case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like
| Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.
|
| "The reality is that it's in companies' interest that software should
| become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,"
| Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the
| way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation.
| "Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal
| photos," Rose said.
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http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html?partner=yahootix
http://tinyurl.com/yyjqoh
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