Cedric Chang nope9.com> writes: > source becomes available to users of the IP. I don't want to see > this as a law.... rather as a standard practice that buyers expect > from vendors. I have seen many wonderful products disappear when the > vendor disappears and no one knows where the vendor or the IP got to. It is not a law it is reality. Talk to someone in the telco, scientific, medical electronics, aerospace or military technology domains and you will see that these industries have 'slightly' more concern for the lifetime of their investments than the average mp3 player maker, salesman or buyer. In the second hand, services (like maintenance and operations) and refurbished equipment markets there are two options for each complex piece of equipment: a) provide documentation including pin-outs and some arcane details and sell for the going price or b) sell for the price it is worth on the scrap metal market. It's the 'consumer' slant on electronics which has propagated into software that is causing the current problem, sometimes known as upgrade-itis. It is bad enough that one's documents tend to 'lose' formatting and tables whenever a upgrades some library or the program itself (and that happens every 3-4 years at most, or so I have seen it happen during the last 13+ or so years). Now how do you use documentation in that format when the time comes, say, 10 years into the lifespan of a product that is meant to last 20+ years? Oops? I was reading recently that the aeronautical industry *still* uses microfiches attached to a special kind of punched card to maintain and distribute data about spare parts. Surely that is not an accident in an industry that used computers since before almost anyone else did. And we are not talking tool-chain and drivers yet, just pin-outs scrambled by formatting loss. I have seen schematics drawn in programs that no longer exist, which could no longer be opened (and the price tags of the unique tools someone makes to allow that anyway). And on and on and on. There were several postings on this list some time ago, about some small software or hardware tool provider who was suddenly not answering emails and the phone, for very serious (health?) reasons. I believe that some company eventually took the relevant product over. I do not remember the details. I try to do what I preach. Since I had to do a lot with old architectures and refurbishing and testing and such I tried very hard to use only open source tools (both hard and soft). I even made my own when there was time for this, for that reason. 2N2022s and other standard parts are still around after 20+ years of doing things like this. It has paid off. Just for laughs, and slightly off topic, I found some old *nix source code on the net, from ~1985 or so, compiled it after minor cosmetics (header files changed etc) on a recent machine and it worked. Manual pages looked right (tables and all), X11 GUI and timing delays work in despite of 200 times faster execution and all that. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist