On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Gerhard Fiedler wrote: > Joe Koberg wrote: > >> Getting bitten by proprietary vendor file formats is common. =A0Try to >> find something to open old WordPerfect documents with some accuracy! >> >> This is one of the biggest reasons to choose open source software and >> software that uses open file formats to me. =A0The 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. > It's a lot different from WordPerfect, because the subversion is Free software. This means sources and binaries are legitimately mirrored across the Internet and will be for a long time. Every Linux install DVD, for example, has the source files located on it somewhere, including SVN source. And you can still download just about every Linux distribution ever made: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux Also, most of these version control systems are written in ANSI C. C compilers aren't going away anytime soon. WordPerfect is hard to find only because of artificial scarcity enforced by copyright. And source was never publicly available to my knowledge, so even if someone wanted to maintain it for modern systems, they would not be able to. Regards, Mark markrages@gmail --=20 Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markrages@midwesttelecine.com --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .