hide python code !

[Paul Boddie]

Ben Sizer wrote:
>
> It's worth remembering that there is a massive amount of software that
> has nothing to do with 'infrastructure', that won't need to be
> maintained, or upgraded. Examples include most retail software for the
> home or small office, and most entertainment software. Developers of
> such software often have understandable reasons for making it
> inconvenient to examine the algorithms at a high level.

It may be the case that certain kinds of applications can go on working
forever on whatever hardware they were intended to run, right until the
point when the hardware ceases to function correctly or when the
end-user gets bored of it, or envious of the neighbour's hardware, or
for whatever other reason. However, I've seen plenty of evidence of
"home or small office" software which arrives as a binary, employs its
own proprietary format, runs on now-legacy hardware and whose users are
now high-and-dry with respect to accessing their old documents.

Sure, developers of such software may not want their competitors to
find out how their products work - certain companies also like to file
patents for that added anticompetitive edge, should their competitors
even consider figuring out the not-so-magic formula - but as end-users
of software ourselves, we don't have to share such an understanding of
their motivations, especially when such motivations directly conflict
with our own: with respect to the above evidence, our own motivations
are to have a reasonable level of control over the tools to manage our
own data.

It may not matter if some console game or other doesn't work after 20
years, although I think it's actually something of a shame given that
such artifacts, no matter how apparently trivial they are, are actually
part of our culture and shouldn't be so readily discarded and
forgotten, but when your own data is not easily accessible within a
much shorter timeframe, the scandal is (at least to me) so much more
obvious.

Paul