Joe Koberg wrote:

> Getting bitten by proprietary vendor file formats is common.  Try to
> find something to open old WordPerfect documents with some accuracy!=20
>=20
> This is one of the biggest reasons to choose open source software and
> software that uses open file formats to me.  The vendor can't
> disappear.

The source repository/download site may disappear. So you have to make
sure you have always the sources locally and know how to build the
executable from them -- and you have to make sure you keep a system
around that actually runs it.

IMO this is not much different (albeit some) from keeping the last
WordPerfect installer around if you need to read WordPerfect files. If
it is not available anymore, there's no guarantee that the sources would
still be available in a buildable form if it had been open source.


> On 2011-03-03 08:14, William Couture wrote:
>> What I do personally is to make a .ZIP file every day of the project
>> I'm working on, source and build files.  Then copy it to a network
>> server. This lets me back up to any point I desire, and I'm also
>> safe in case my work computer dies suddenly.

Zipping code manually is nothing really different from using a version
control system, it's just that the latter provides more comfortable (and
quicker) to use commands for the commonly required actions.

Gerhard
--=20
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