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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 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.

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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.

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.

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.

Software escrow exists for this reason. I was honestly surprised when I discovered it existed when a customer demanded it.

Yup, NCC group, of all people owns a big software escrow service they recently acquired from Iron Mountain.

NCC has been doing escrow for a very long time before the Iron Mountain acquisition.

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.

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.

Please do this actually sounds fascinating.

What are the pretections against cheating the audit process?

Do you specify a frequency for validations?

What type of pricing model does the service use?

How long can you escrow something?

DF=Dwarf Fortress

Please type things out in full so other people don't have to use a search engine just to follow along.

iykyk

Tarn Adams has this base covered: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyjam3/what-will-happen-to-g...

> 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/

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.

$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.

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.

Then why hasn't it been done?

> 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.

Feel free to write it. People have been complaining that they want something better for quite a while (in both the US and EU). This project has been around since 1997(!) and someone could have replaced it over 25 years. And yet, no one has.

This isn't a technical problem and it absolutely stupefies me that people can't seem to wrap their heads around this.

You will field customer support calls. A lot of them. Ballroom competitions tend to have lots of non-tech people in them. You will field irate calls because something went wrong in the middle of a competition (even if none of it is your fault).

All for $1000 a competition. Not per competitor--per competition. Roughly speaking--the price of tickets from two competitors.

I look forward to seeing your replacement.

(Note: In fact there ARE other "more modern" solutions in the space. And they all say "Contact Us" when you start looking for pricing. Translation: we're going to charge way more than $1000).

I have no idea how much running a dance competition costs, but given that competitors expect to spend $450[1][2] on entry fees for a single competition I think that the organizers spending $1000 on software seems like a bargain?

> it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership

This is a really, really odd take.

Firstly, as pointed out above the cost of $1000 for a competition seems pretty reasonable.

Secondly, where do you get "being friends with corrupt leadership" from?

Most sports/recreation activities suffer from a huge lack of software. They are crying out for anything that helps them. If the leadership knows the author of the software, that isn't corruption that is a small community - and probably a good thing since it means the author probably listens to them.

[1] https://vitaminb.blog/cost-pro-am-dance-competition/

[2] https://danceparent101.com/the-real-costs-of-competitive-dan...

I was on a comittee organising about 8 years back for the southern universities latin and ballroom competition, so not a professional one, but also not profit making.

The full day cost around £6200, that included music, demonstration couple, compare, 6 judges, food, first aiders, venue hire, officials, trophies, medals, programmes, decorations. We then charged around £12.50 entry for ~500 students.

The national competition for universities happens in blackpool every year and I imagine the costs are around 3-4x that considering the venue and number of officials. And unless we got discounts for being universities, or the judges are paid less, i imagine it costs at least £28,000 to put on a big professional competition.

In a comparable venue to the winter gardens in blackpool

I suspect that every dance competition community has equivalent software.

The West Coast Swing community has:

* steprightsolutions.com

* danceConvention.net

and probably others that I'm less familiar with.

All with: "Contact Us For Pricing"

> 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.

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.

Yes, I'm running some proprietary software for my Nikon Coolscan film scanner. Compatibility mode and a some other stuff.

No, and it's much more thorny than you make it out to me. Windows Vista (I think... 7 for sure) and later cannot run 16bit exes at all.

While the software itself was 32bit, many of the intallers of that era were Intallshield/InstallerWise that were still actually 16bit, so while if you could get the thing installed...you can't.

Windows 7 included an "XP Mode" virtual machine which could run 16 bit applications.

Wrong, it's the 64 bit versions that can't run 16 bit software. But even Windows 10 can run 3.11 apps if you use the 32 bit release.

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.

There are workarounds, e.g. http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html

On Linux, as long as the program is compatible with Wine[1] to begin with, Wine will support programs that that require basically any Windows version. Maybe this specific community needs to spin up some Ubuntu or OpenSuse boxes?

[1] https://www.winehq.org/

Open source means that anyone sufficiently able and sufficiently motivated can keep up with these changes. In that humans have to be touching code to keep up with api / abi changes, not letting humans touch code is the actual problem in this case. The human that did died, and the humans left kept it closed source.

That looks a lot like a claim that software only deserves to exist if it is made by, or attracts the fanatical devotion of, people who have a deep love of maintaining software against a moving target.

Ugh.

The expectation that once you've made something you can't expect it to keep working without endless catchup, attitudes like this one, are why I have completely given up making software for fun or to solve noncommercial problems for myself and others.

I'm not the only one.

> The expectation that once you've made something you can't expect it to keep working

I don't think there is a single type of item in the world for which you could expect it to keep existing indefinitely without maintenance. Machines rust, wood degrades, paintings need restoring every few centuries. And even when properly stored in controlled atmosphere etc, books from a few centuries ago are almost unreadable because the language has changed so much since then (see https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/diagram_4english.html for example).

Everything in this world needs constant maintenance or it breaks down. Why would you expect software to be any different?

This is a wholly false analogy. If I store most things properly they decay only very slowly and most maintenance tasks are easy. The software equivalent of that is only making sure I don't lose something to bit rot. No software lasts long enough for that, I look away for a year or so and someone broke something it stands on. It's not analogous to keeping an old book in a safe, it's analogous to keeping an old book in the street while random strangers queue up to piss on it.

I have books up to 500 years old that are perfectly readable. I have programs I wrote single digit years ago that I'd need to give up a couple of days just to find out if I can get their build chain back and dig them out of dependency hell. Not worth it to buy, at best, a few years before I get to repeat the experience. Restoring and rebuilding old physical things is also far more rewarding because when I do it properly I never have to do it again.

You seem to be cherrypicking the heirloom quality physical items and comparing them to programs that were constructed with not nearly as much care.

I've owned physical objects that were worthless a few months (cheap throwaway), and have also worked on code that was over 5 decades old and still compiled just fine. If you construct the software with care it is entirely feasible to have something that you can run several decades from now, but that does mean that you shouldn't use dependencies which might disappear in that time. Curl or sqlite are probably fine, a dependency with a single maintainer is probably not fine. Network dependencies on DNS or NTP are probably fine, depending on the API of some 1-year old startup is almost certainly not fine.

I expect it to be different because it is different.

Machines rusting and painting needing restoration is because they oxidize. Wood does not magically degrade, it decomposes. These are physical phenomena confined to the physical world.

Your example of the book being unreadable because people's language changed, that is a closer example but even that falls short because language is a human to human communication pathway. We have to spend literal years training people to understand it, it is inherently chaotic and messy.

Software is math, it is engineered. We don't wake up to find that suddenly the coefficient of friction is different and now our tires fail to grip the road. Or more to the point, that our speed and feed calculators are now trash and will crash the endmill into material ruining the machine and part.

Computers and their ability to run or not run software after and update is completely in the control of the people programing the updates. The reason so much software fails is because either A. It was not well designed to begin with or B. the people creating the update did not design it well.

Thank you. You put it better than I did.

Except software isn’t math. Math is entirely self contained and self defining. Software has dependencies in hardware and other software that are not contained in the software. A better analogy is the symbolism of an algebra and way of expressing math. While calculus hasn’t changed for techniques known at the time, fluxions aren’t supported as a method and symbology while a derivation of liebnitz’ notation is. The math is invariant but the symbology and evaluation methods change with time.

Likewise hardware architectures change, and it’s absurd to assert machine code from the Eniac must run on every architecture, as well as every variation of every machine ever made on every future hardware in perpetuity. There are to this point many preservation efforts that create emulators that run on modern hardware or reference virtual machines that can be carried forward. But to expect this to be done in situ everywhere all the time for everything is on the surface absurd and unreasonable to an extreme.

Edit: the Eniac didn’t have machine code, but switches and wiring - even more to my point. While it’s still just math and logic, it’s not reasonable to carry forward all software configurations of the machine.

I feel you. But the challenge is supporting ancient apis and abis over time greatly complicates the underling runtime. There’s a natural tension between flexibility for the evolving system that adapts to modern needs and techniques and hardware and one that runs ancient runtimes in perpetuity. Things have gone back and forth over time and the winner tends to be the simplest one, which is apis stay stable over some lifetime until some well advertised horizon then things stop working if they don’t make the effort to evolve. Just like I don’t expect to be able to plug in a old mainframe RLO drive into my MacBook M2Max and have it work, you can’t plausibly expect ancient runtimes to work forever. That said, a lot of effort goes into writing emulators, and I’d expect this specific software will see a second life at some point

> Open source means that anyone sufficiently able and sufficiently motivated can keep up with these changes

Provided there is anybody with very rare combination of being developer proficient in whatever language was used to write this software and who knows how Torah is read/sang

I don’t think making it compile on a new architecture requires any understanding of the Torah.

Running old versions of macOS with VMWare Fusion is pretty easy as long as you still have an Intel Mac. I've been doing it for years to build legacy software, and for testing software compatibility with old versions of macOS.

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.

Does Github have a feature to just switch all my private repositories to public when I die?

This would be a useful feature. Though how will it know when you die?

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch

But, not the “temporarily incapacitated or otherwise unable to login” problem.

Coma, incarceration, etc.

Yes, it's answering a different question.

But it puts the onus on the user to decide what they want to happen in those circumstances rather than leaving on Telegram to decide whether such and such person is living or dead.

Weirdly, the hard part here is reliably knowing when you died. Messy solvable in a localized way. Really, really hard to solve on a global scale.

Why not make it trigger on not logging in for N months, and after ignoring multiple attempts to notify you? This is what Google's inactive account manager does.

But Google's inactive account manager doesn't then publish all your emails on the open web.

There could be any secrets (API keys, etc) in a GitHub repo.

I was going to speculate more about how GitHub could handle this, but it turns out they already have a system where you name a successor and they get control of your public repos 7d after GitHub receives a death certificate or 21d after an obituary. But they don't include private repos: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

That sounds like extortion to me. Like, stop using github and we will make all your stuff public despite you originally intending it to be private.

We are talking about the developer opting in.

We're talking about an optional feature for developers who want it, that you have to go and turn on.

(And it should have very clear warnings before you turn it on so you don't accidentally make things public that shouldn't be. Plus, there should probably be some sort of way to tag which repose would still need to stay private even after your death.)

A deadman switch should be good enough.

If your executor sends GitHub a death-certificate, that problem is completely resolved.

Eh, if I don’t respond for a few months I’m probably dead enough. It’s something you’d enable yourself, so you’d know that all your repos were made public if you ever wake up from a 6 month coma.

There is a feature to nominate a successor who can do certain things to your repositories when you die.

Yeah, I just want to avoid having to bother anyone.

Feature proposal: it should display the comparison between the cost of licensing the software, and the cost of hiring a hitman.

People were pissed with Bill Gates for close sourcing DOS so your open source is new and hip bit can get off our artificial lawn! <ShakesWalkerAndVi />

Actually software was almost always free and public domain up until the early 1970’s as accountants realized they could extort more dollars by making software licensing models. In 1983 Richard Stallman made the gnu copy left and fsf as a reaction to the role of aggressive sales jocks and bean counters in computing. The rest, is, of course, well know. But the 1950-1970 period was also, albeit less formalized, a heyday of more unfettered public domain development. I’d also note that concurrently in the 1980’s was the shareware movement, which didn’t generally distribute source but free binaries (or with nominal distribution costs to cover media etc).

The moral of the story is accountants know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and if you really want to kill something of beauty, let an accountant be in charge. (Source: I’m married to an accountant - while a person I love, she can’t understand living for any other reason than counting money)

The reason why originally software was free is that there were no software companies, only hardware companies shipping software with their hardware. It’s good to think whether you’d have a job in that world.

Well that’s not entirely true. A lot of software was academic. And, yes, I would. It wasn’t a world that paid well, but for those interested (and there were few) there was a lot of demand. But the pay was like that of an accountant. When I grew up it wasn’t a greatly enriching career but a stable one and I never doubted from five I would do this. I was lucky to land at Netscape at the start of the current modern software gold rush ride.

you might appreciate some graeber (and/or wengrow) for wider contexts

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.

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.

LLMs might become helpful here.

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.

>> Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course.

Or patch it to skip that check.

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.

As always, XKCD has touched on this [1].

1: https://xkcd.com/2347/

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