My bank started using Quickbooks file format if I want to download a transaction history in a specific date range, what a fucking nightmare. It’s not abandoned yet but nothing except the QuickBooks proprietary software seems to open them so far, only a matter of time. Honestly at this point I might prefer the nightmarish CSV filetype.
The problem is that it’s not really a standard. It’s reinvented ad-hoc by whomever programs it today.
Should there be any whitespace after the comma? Do you want to use pipes or some other character instead of commas (ASCII 0x1E is sitting over there for exactly this purpose, but it’s been ignored for decades)? How do you handle escaping your separator char inside the dataset? Are you [CR] or [LF} or [CR] [LF]? None of these questions have a set answer. Even JSON has more specification than this.
Regarding “the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new”, I’ll invoke Hanlon’s razor.
I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.
They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.
And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.
Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it’s developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).
I don’t know how we can’t legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just… throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it’s going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it’s just garbage.
The US (and all of their allies) are in favor of wealth redistribution to the ultra-wealthy, so predatory practices like this will never be stopped unless there is a sufficiently organized and pissed off mass movement calling for it. Researchers are a tiny group, so it won’t happen.
because “we” don’t own our government, the parasites who profit from the thing you want to change have all the power. labor needs to organize, the alternatives are capitalists killing us all or the-doohickey
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can’t handle drivers and for security reasons can’t get low level hardware access.
Not really I’m afraid. ReactOS is focused on implementing the old APIs which allows software that used those APIs to function.
But my experience with old proprietary software from that era is that they were trying to do something which was hard at the time. So they wrote their software with lots of clever tricks and hacks, to make the thing do the thing. This can be as simple as manually invoking interrupts and using undocumented APIs, to setting up non protected memory and communicating with the hardware directly.
I’ve seen cases where the software would only run with a specific version of Windows 95 and only with specific chipsets. Even changing the cpu from an Intel to a Cyrix for example could cause issues.
I was involved as an intern with a project to fix something like this a long time ago. We chose to simply reverse engineer the hardware interface, put in a custom controller to handle it and write modern software. It took a lot of doing and we lost some features, but the original system was beyond saving.
As time went on more and more hardware abstraction is applied, so I would hope this issue would be fixed in the future. But the whole of the 90s and early 2000s is a big issue.
Ah yeah, drivers are another thing entirely. Especially for what I imagine is very proprietary undocumented hardware. The only thing that can help there is a reverse engineer / kernel module dev.
Alright I know this is going to get some hate and I fully support emulation and an overhaul of US copyright and patent law but the justmeremember's supportive post is just bad. This is the same bad practice that many organizations, especially manufacturing, have problems with. If the ~20 years of raw data is so important, then why is it sitting on decades passed end-of-life stuff?
If it is worth the investment, then why not invest in a way to convert the data into something less dependent on EOL software? There's lots of ways, cheap and not to do this.
But even worse, I bet there 'raw' data that's only a year old still sitting on those machines. I don't know if the 'lab guy' actually pulls a salary or not but maybe hire someone to begin trying to actually solve the problem instead of maintaining an eventual losing game?
In ~20 years they couldn't be cutting slivers from the budget to eventually invest in something that would perhaps 'reset the clock?'
At this point I wouldn't be surprised to find a post of them complaining about Excel being too slow and unstable because they've been using it as a database for ~20 years worth of data at this point either.
Because it's often not worth the investment. You would pay a shit ton for a one time conversion of data that is still accessible.
Still accessible for now and less likely to be accessible as the clock ticks and less likely that there is compatible hardware to replace.
If it isn't worth the investment, then what's the problem here? So what if the data is lost? It obviously isn't worth it.
If the software became open source, because the company abandoned it, then that cost could potentially be brought down significantly.
OK but that isn't a counter point to what I said. If the hardware never fails, there is no problem either. What does that matter? And who cares if it was FOSS (though I am a FOSS advocate). What if nobody maintains it?
It doesn't matter because these aren't the reality of the problems that this person is dealing with. Why not make some FOSS that takes care of the issue and runs on something that isn't on borrowed time and can endure not only hardware changes but operating system changes? That'd be relevant. It goes back to my point doesn't it? Why not hire this person.
Clean room reverse engineering has case law precedent that essentially make this low risk legally (certainly nil if the right's holder is defunct).
You are also missing the parts where functional hardware loses support. Which is even worse in my opinion.
I didn't miss the point. I even made the point of having at least ~20 years to plan for it in the budget. Also the hardware has already lost support or there wouldn't be an issue, would there? You could just keep sustaining it without relying on a diminishing supply.
Or are we talking about some hypothetical hardware that wasn't mentioned? I guess I would have missed that point since it was never made.
Ah. So…blame the victim. Cause apparently capitalism is, like, perfect or something.
The company selling the software arbitrarily created a problem for no reason other than greed. And yet, the ones not forking over more money are the problem.
Yeah, hard no from me on your entire argument, buddy.
I didn't say capitalism is perfect nor did I imply it.
So hypothetically let's say the vendor lost the rights to the software since it is abandonware -- great. I'd love it.
What changes for justmeremember's situation? Nothing changes.
I suppose your only issue here is that the software vendor or some entity should support it forever. OK, so why didn't they just choose a FOSS alternative or make one themselves? If not then, why not now? There is nothing that stops them from the latter other than time and effort. Even better, everyone else could benefit!
Does that make justmeremember just as culpable here or are they still the victim with no reasonable way to a solution?
I posted simply because this specific issue is much too common and also just as common is the failure to actually solve it regardless of the abandonware argument instead of stop-gapping and kicking it down the line until access to the data is gone forever.
I suppose your only issue here is that the software vendor or some entity should support it forever.
If no entity wants to take on support, they should be forced to release the source code to the Public Domain. Copyright is a social contract, not an entitlement – if you don’t hold up your end of the bargain of keeping it available, you deserve to lose it.
Well, I think a better solution would be to deliver all source code with the compiled software as well. I suppose that would extend to the operating system itself and the hope that there'd be enough motivation for skillful folks to maintain that OS and support for new hardware. Great, that would indeed solve the problem and is a potential outcome if digital rights are overhauled. This is something I fully support.
What is stopping them now from solving access to this data, even if it's in a proprietary format?
Really, again, I don't take issue with the abandonware argument but rather with the situation that I posted itself. Source code availability and the rights surrounding are only one part of the larger problem in the post.
Source code and the rights to it, aren't the root cause of the problem in the post that I was regarding. It could facilitate a solution, sure but given that there is at least ~20 years of data at risk currently, there was also ~20 years of potential labor hours to solve it. Yet, instead, they chose to 'solve' it in a terrible way. That is what I take issue with.
This is really not a problem that’s fixed by open source.
The microscope will be controlled by a card that only plugs into 30 year old desktops. If you open source the drivers for it this only gives you the source code to drivers for Windows 95. These drivers will be incredibly hacky and hard coded and probably die if you install a service pack.
Having access to the source code doesn’t let you replace the entire stack because you’re still physically tied to old hardware, that is worse than a raspberry pi and even just making sure that you can update Windows is a feat of engineering.
At the very least, being able to read the source code gives you a Hell of a head start on writing a new driver for an appropriate OS (and by that I mean Linux, obviously). Saves a whole reverse-engineering step.
I’m not saying creating an entire project to adapt the controller and software stack to modern systems would be cheap or easy, but it’s possible – and more to the point, seemingly less expensive than buying the new microscope for “hundreds of thousands of €” (especially in the long run, since the company is likely to pull the same shit over and over again), even if you’ve got to pay a gaggle of comp-e grad students to put it together for you.
Because they’re a science research lab not a computer programming lab? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying but they’re not the right people, nor in the right situation to be solving this problem.
It isn't necessarily a computer programming problem either. Rather it is an IT problem at least in part, one that the poster states is the primary job of his 'lab guy' -- to maintain two ancient Windows 95 computers specifically. That person must know enough to sustain the troubleshooting and replacement of the hardware and certainly at least the transfer of data from the own spinning hard drives. Why not instead put that technical expertise into actually solving the problem long-term? Why not just run both in qemu and use hardware passthru if required? At least then, you would rid yourself of the ticking time-bomb of hardware and its diminishing availability. That RAM that is no longer made isn't going to last forever. They don't even need to know much about how it all works. There are guides, even for Windows 95 available.
Perhaps there are other hurdles such as running something on ISA but even so, eventually it isn't going to matter. Primarily, it seems rather the hurdle is specifically the software and the data it facilitates though. Does it really have some sort of ancient hardware dependency? Maybe. But in all that time of this 'lab guy' who's main role is just these two machines must have some time to experiment and figure this out. The data must be copyable, even as a straight hard drive image even if it isn't a flat file (extremely doubtful but it doesn't matter). I mean the data is by the author's own emphasis CRITICAL.
If it is CRITICAL then why don't they give it that priority, even to the lone 'lab guy' that's acting IT?
Unless there's some big edge case here that just isn't simply said and there is something above and beyond simply just the software they speak about, I feel like I've put more effort into typing these responses than it would take to effectively solve the hardware on life support side of it. Solving the software dependency side? Depending on how the datasets are logically stored it may require a software developer but it also may not. However, simply virtualizing the environment would solve many, if not all, of these problems with minimal investment, especially to CRITICAL (their emphasis) data with ~20 years to figure it out. It would simply be a new computer and some sort of media to install Linux or *BSD on and perhaps a COTS converter if it is using something like an LPT interface or even a DB9/DE-9 D-Sub (though you can still find modern motherboards, cards or even laptops capable of supporting those but also certainly a cheap USB adapter as well).
Anyway, I'm just going to leave it at that, I think I've said a lot on the subject to numerous people and do not have much more to add other than this is most likely solvable and outside of severe edge cases, solvable without expert knowledge considering the timeframe.
In a GxP environment with bespoke pharmaceutical equipment you are spending anywhere from 1-4000 collective labour hours and anywhere from 50k-250k for a control system upgrade, URS/TRS/SDS, Code risk assessment and review, and Qualification. To give you an idea, on a therapeutic manufacturing plant you’re looking at a handful of two inch binders for the end to end system.
You are also (and more importantly) taking your resources off BAU or revenue generating improvement work for this project. You have a validated and qualified system, and even if you are spending $10-20k for a $500 like for like IPC or control card, the cost benefits of another 5 years is worth it.
If your equipment is a medical device, such as a diagnostic microscope, add another few binders of paperwork and regulator sign off. There’s a reason the equipment is so expensive
If you get into the food industry, or general manufacturing the barriers to upgrade are much less. For your machine shop running floppy disks, it’s a case of the external cost would approach the cost of a new machine, and the existing machine is fine.
As a maintenance professional this is the sort of risk management we conduct on an ongoing basis.
Obviously the company is the bad guy here. But if the research data is so important, the lab should try to solve their problem instead of just praying that the 20 year old machine won’t fail.
I study in biotech and currently doing a traineeship in a university lab that likely operates in a similiar way, albeit we are way less expensive to operate and require a bit less precision and safety than medical stuff (so for them the problems here are exacerbated).
Instruments like the ones we use are super expensive (we’re talking in the order of hundreds of thousands of €), funding is not great, salaries are often laughable, the amount of data is huge and sometimes keeping it for many years is very important. On top of that most people here barely understand computer and software beyond whet they’ve used, which makes sense, they went to study biotech and environmental stuff not computer science. There’s an IT team in the university but honestly they barely renew the security certificates for the login pages for the university wifi so that’s laughable, and granted they’re likely underpaid, probably a result of low public funding as well. Sure, none of the problems would be too impacting if we had all the funding in the world and people who know what they’re doing, but that is not the case and that’s why we need regulations.
What you’re suggesting is treating the symptoms but not the disease. Making certain file formats compatible with other programs is not an easy undertaking and certainly not for people without IT experience. Software for tools this expensive should either be open source from the get-go or immediately open-sourced as soon as it’s abandoned or company goes bust because ain’t no way we can afford to just throw out a perfectly functioning and serviceable tool that costed us 100s of thousands of €s just because a company went bust or decided that “no you must buy a whole new instrument we won’t give you old software no more” in order to access the data they made incompatible with other stuff. Even with plenty of funding to workaround the issue that shouldn’t be necessary, it’s a waste of time and money just so a greedy company can make a few extra bucks.
So again and again and again, I was not arguing against the abandonware issue. I take issue with how the problem is being stop-gapped in this current situation and not in some hypothetical alternate timeline.
Instruments like the ones we use are super expensive
Great. I didn't imply otherwise.
On top of that most people here barely understand computer and software
So the lab guy maintaining Windows 95 era computer's hardware, barely understands computers. Got it. I suppose this same lab guy won't be able to do anything even if the source code was available and would still being doing the same job.
What you’re suggesting is treating the symptoms but not the disease. Making certain file formats compatible with other programs is not an easy undertaking and certainly not for people without IT experience.
I didn't say it isn't. I said they've had ~20 years to figure it out. What would source code being available solve for them then? We could assume other people would come together to maintain it, sure. I've also talked about other solutions in replies. There are even more solutions. I wasn't trying to cover all bases there. It is just that within a couple of decades this has been a problem, there has been plenty of time to solve it.
Software for tools this expensive should either be open source from the get-go or immediately open-sourced as soon as it’s abandoned or company goes bust
Oh OK, so that makes it less complicated. I thought the assumption here is that, in general, anyone in that lab barely understands a computer or how software works. So, who's going to maintain it? Hopefully, others, sure. I actually do talk about this in other replies and how it is something I support and that, in this case, the solution is to deliver the source with the product. FOSS is fantastic. Why can't that just be done now by these same interested parties? Or are we back to "can't computer" again? Then what good is the source code anyway?
But again, that's a "what-if things were different" which isn't what I was discussing. I was discussing this specific, real and fairly common issue of attempting to maintain EOL/EOSL hardware. It is a losing game and eventually, it just isn't going to work anymore.
Even with plenty of funding to workaround the issue that shouldn’t be necessary, it’s a waste of time and money just so a greedy company can make a few extra bucks.
Alright, the source code is available for this person. Let's just say that. What now?
What can be done right now, is fairly straight forward and there are numerous step-by-step guides. That's to virtualize the environment. There is also an option to use hardware passthru, if there is some unmentioned piece of equipment. This could be done with some old laptop or computer that you've probably tossed in the dumpster 10 years ago. The cost is likely just some labor. Perhaps that same lab guy can poke around or if they're at a university, have their department reach out to the Computer Science or other IT related teaching department and ask if there are any volunteers, even for undergrads. There are very likely students that would want to take it on, just because they want to figure it out and nothing else.
There may be an edge case where it won't work due to some embedded proprietary hardware but that's yet another hypothetical issue at stake which is to open source hardware. That's great. Who's going to make that work in a modern motherboard? The person that you've supposed can't do that because they barely understand a computer at all?
In this current reality, with the specific part of the post I am addressing, the solution currently of sustaining something ancient with diminishing supply is definitely not the answer. That is the point I was making. There is a potential of ~20 years of labor hours. There is a potential of ~20 years of portioning of budgets. And let's not forget, according to them, it is "CRITICAL" to their operations. Yet, it is maintained by a "lab guy" who may or may not have anything other than a basic understanding of computers using hardware that's no longer made and hoping to cannibalize, use second hand and find in bins somewhere.
If this "lab guy" isn't up to the task, then why are they entrusted with something so critical with nothing done about it in approximately two decades? If they are up to the task, then why isn't a solution with longevity and real risk mitigation being taken on? It is a short-sighted mentality to just kick it down the road over and over again plainly hoping something critical is never lost.
If it’s open source someone who knows about software can do it so that we don’t have to. Doesn’t even need to be a guy in the lab since he could just maintain a github repo and we’d use his thing.
If this “lab guy” isn’t up to the task, then why are they entrusted with something so critical with nothing done about it in approximately two decades?
Cause the instrument is important and replacing it, aside from being a massive waste of a perfectly functioning instrument, costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of € that we can’t spend just because some company decided to be shit and some dude on Lemmy said we shouldn’t use stop-gap measures for a problem that’s completely artificial.
Cause the instrument is important and replacing it, aside from being a massive waste of a perfectly functioning instrument, costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of € that we can’t spend
Why would you need to replace the instrument? You only need to replace the computers' functions. Why does it need to cost anything other than some other old workstation tossed into an ewaste bin years ago?
some dude on Lemmy said we shouldn’t use stop-gap measures for a problem that’s completely artificial.
As opposed to some dude on Lemmy bemoaning that there just can't be solved without source even though I've given actual solutions available now and for little to no material cost?
You have admitted that you'd still have to rely on someone else's expertise and motivation in the hopes that they'd solve the problem for the lab, yet, in my opinion, you're just discarding solutions that I've presented as if they aren't solutions at all because, at least in one of your points, that they'd have to rely on someone else's expertise and motivation in the hopes that they'd solve the problem for the lab. Even then, as I said, they've had decades to figure it out and there exist step-by-step instructions already that are freely available to help them solve the problem or get them almost to the end, assuming, there is some proprietary hardware never mentioned.
Anyway, I don't really have anything else to add to the conversation. So you can have the last word, if you wish.
Because the company made it so it only works with its specific software. Sure maybe you could try and find a way to hack another software in it but that is significantly harder than the stop-gap measures or full-replacement. If you mess up you can end up breaking an extremely expensive tool, and, since funding is extremely limited (talking bare-minimum or even less sometimes), that means you won’t risk it.
As opposed to some dude on Lemmy bemoaning that there just can’t be solved without source even though I’ve given actual solutions available now and for little to no material cost?
Yeah well one Lemmy dude actually knows the situation and how things work around a lab and one doesn’t seem to understand. It isn’t “little to no cost” evidently or most of us sure as shit wouldn’t be dealing with stop-gap measures.
You have admitted that you’d still have to rely on someone else’s expertise and motivation in the hopes that they’d solve the problem for the lab
There would easily be a team of software engineers who would take on maintaining a lot of the abandonware software we use in a lab since there’s a lot of folks who still rely on that software that the company abandoned, including people who know about software more. The key difference you don’t understand is that if the source was open it wouldn’t be necessary to have an IT enthusiast in every single lab that needs it, you only need 1 or 2 to maintain a repo.
Even then, as I said, they’ve had decades to figure it out and there exist step-by-step instructions already that are freely available to help them solve the problem or get them almost to the end, assuming, there is some proprietary hardware never mentioned.
First of all, not all abandonware is decades old. Secondly, people are already using the stop-gap solutions that you’d find on the internet, like never connecting the computer to the internet and pray nothing breaks, for example.
Its incredibly wasteful, but there is another perspective.
When that microscope was purchased, it formed part of someone’s budget throughout its service life. Support would have been guaranteed for that service life, but that life has now expired.
The company isn’t obligated to assist buyers beyond that service life, and doing so would eat into current and future profits.
There is not a single commenter (nor downvoter) in this thread who would open the source for that microscope if they owned that microscope company.
I 100% would. It's short term loss for long term gain.
Which microscope are you going to buy? The one with the software that's company supported through it's amortization period and then community supported afterwards, or the one where you're sol after it's paid off?
Of course you’re going to buy the one where “you’re sol after it’s service life” because that’s the one who’s manufacturer has been able to afford to invest in any R & D.
All things being equal, if there’s a company who’s model is some kind of eternal service life and another with a limited service life obviously the latter will be a better product.
Most commenters here are talking about a lab budget in the same way you’d manage household finance in some kind of “buy it for life” philosophy which is just not how org budgets work. Managers don’t work on a life long time scale, they want the best results from projects with limited scope. You buy the best microscope that you can afford, not the one which is going to have continued support 20 years after you’ve left the org.
Lots of labs don't need the highest end equipment, and the ones that do could sell the old ones.
That would work if we didn't have everything set up to throw out, which is a different problem all together. I've worked in IT procurement for a fairly big corporation, and I've seen dumpsters filled with slightly old iPhones because it made more sense to accounting.
I would. Not only would I do so voluntarily, but I also support STRONG consumer protection laws that would force any product or software or copyright or patent into public domain the instant it’s been unavailable for sale for 3 or more years or has gone without update for 5 years.
Our public domain and consumer protections are pathetic, and should be vigorously bolstered and defended.
If you force a company to continue support they will just give it a stupid price tag. “Sure we will continue to support this $250k microscope, if you would like us to write a windows 11 client for you that will cost $1m.”
I’m saying that you can’t legislate that abandoned software must become public domain. If you asked a company whether it was abandoned they would just say yes it’s still supported, with a completely impractical price tag for support.
I’ve been handing out free copies of shit for over a decade now. Shit that I got published as an author.
I would absolutely do the same with software. Mind you, that’s assuming I was allowed to. It’s unlikely any given code monkey is going to own the company entirely with that kind of hardware.
It is sociality absolutely equivalent to software.
You don’t have to continue adding to a book, just like a company wouldn’t have to continue development of the software involved. You let the owner of the hardware write their own fanfiction to keep the hardware alive.
And, yeah, actually, giving away free copies is absolutely denying a future sale of that publication.
However, that’s not even the point. You said nobody downvoting would do that, give away the software that was no longer being maintained. I absolutely would do so. You can debate equivalency all you want, but that has nothing to do with my statement that I absolutely would at least open source any deprecated software like the post is discussing. As you may have noticed, other people have stated that they would act based on their principles as well. If you don’t want to believe any of us, that’s on you, but calling that many people liars tends to be dumber than dammit if you don’t have a good reason to do so.
Again, me, the unnamed person behind the screen, would 100% either open source the software in question, or otherwise make it available to previous customers. That’s my principle, I fully support the right to repair.
See, the idea that planned obsolescence via lack of service and support is a good thing isn’t accepted by everyone. That theoretical future sale is only possible, and unless I held a monopoly on whatever thing I’m selling, there’s a significant chance of losing sales to competitors that give better customer service. I’d much rather have repeat customers that know they can invest in my product without worry.
I’d also much rather know that my product was doing good work, advancing research and human knowledge, than sell another and waste the previous one.
Maybe you don’t think that way. Maybe you want to maximize profits over any other concern. That’s your karma, your decision, not mine.
It is sociality absolutely equivalent to software.
We’re not talking about software, the microscope is a product involving research and development, a team of engineers, a production facility, and accompanying software. To say “this software should be open source” is to disregard the product that it’s a part of.
I’m not trying to be condescending but the investment required to produce specialised lab equipment is several orders of magnitude greater than that required to author a book.
And, yeah, actually, giving away free copies is absolutely denying a future sale of that publication.
No it’s not because of the people you give free copies, only an infinitessimal minority would actually buy one. Plus every copy you give away promotes additional sales. Also, IDK anything about you so I don’t intend this to be as condescending as it sounds - but it’s very common to buy a run of 10,000 books just to call yourself a best selling author. Giving away books is pretty meaningless I’m sorry.
If you don’t want to believe any of us, that’s on you, but calling that many people liars tends to be dumber than dammit if you don’t have a good reason to do so.
I do have some specialist knowledge in this area. I advise people on strategic business decisions in the course of my work. I don’t care very much whether you believe me or think I’m dumber than damnit but it’s safe to say that few commenters here have a better understanding of people’s behavior with business & profit decisions than I do.
I absolutely would at least open source any deprecated software like the post is discussing
Then you couldn’t run a viable company in an oligopoly. It’s a mistake to think of this as deprecated software. It’s a component of an earlier product. Microsoft isn’t going to opensource windows 10 just because windows 11 has been released.
That’s my principle, I fully support the right to repair.
No one is impeding the right to repair. Old mate is repairing the computers that run windows 95.
Maybe you don’t think that way. Maybe you want to maximize profits over any other concern.
I don’t think it’s really fair to make assumptions about my character just because I pointed out an alternative perspective that seems completely lost in these threads.
Frankly, assuming that every company you interact with are greedy fat cats is very lazy thinking.
For all you know the producers of this expensive lab equipment are using sales to labs in wealthy research labs to subsidise free microscopes for tertiary institutions in developing nations.
Unfortunately it seems like all you have is a right to repair hammer and you’re trying to hit everything with it even in cases where it doesn’t apply.
Forcing companies to release source code once they go bankrupt or abandon a project can only have good results. Yes, it eats into profits of successors, but something being profitable does not mean it’s good. If people would rather use decades old code rather than something new, what does that say about the quality of the new code? This would force companies to continuously improve, rather than profit from stagnation. And it would prune away the parts of the economy that contribute nothing.
This comment is based on the assumption that the company manufacturing the lab equipment is enjoying unreasonable profits, which is not necessarily the case.
You can’t force companies to support software. They will just attach an impractical though reasonable price tag to continued support. “Sure we can support that microscope, it will cost you 2x the price of our new model”.
This would force companies to continuously improve
On the contrary, there’s no money to invest in development of newer models if no one will buy them.
They can’t make huge profits if we don’t scam our customers by forcing to upgrade their perfectly fine equipment. We need planned obsolescence to be this greedy, damn it!
I’m also curious how many people in this thread have ever been involved in product development and are actual trained/professional software devs. Because not only are some of these comments absolutely ridiculous from a business perspective, they make zero sense in a technical perspective too.
Proprietary file formats show up because often times the needs of the system don’t line up with CSV, JSON, raw text or they hit some performance problem where you literally can’t write that much data to the disk so you have come to come up with something different.
There’s also that a computer program in the last 50 years is, except for extreme circumstances, never truly on its own. That microscope control software is completely dependent on how Win95 works, is almost certainly reliant on some old DOS kernel behavior that was left over in early Windows, which Microsoft later completely ripped out starting with Win Vista (tossed back in for Win7 cause so many people complained, then ripped it back out in 8 which no one seemed to care about)
And it’s not just Microsoft that pulls this, even Lemmy’s darling Linux has deprecated things over the years because even in open source projects it’s unmaintainable to keep everything working for forever.
Companies used to release switchboard schematics and detailed instructions on how to maintain an repair their products all the time. Products becoming unrepairable and unsupported is a relatively new trend.
That's why people are now trying to get the government involved to reverse that trend and go back to the old times where you had access to everything you needed to maintain your equipment.
The service life of a hard good like that was not defined at the time they bought it. Nobody told them it would be abandoned in a few years. When you buy a car, it’s your car for as long as you can keep it running. It doesn’t drop dead at the end of its depreciation schedule.
This is why right to repair matters. I will NEVER ask a company to repair something I purchased if I can do it myself. Oh wait, they’re doing everything in their power to prevent me from being independent after the purchase…
Practically every single manufacturer that makes things more complex than spoons wants to keep fucking me in the ass and for me to keep paying money for thing I already bought and “own”.
At least when the spoon breaks… Except I never witnessed it happen in my life, I’m still eating with same stainless steel spoons that I grew up with.
And no, I could easily open source that microscope, because I’m not afraid that some lackey that can’t even design his own microscope will have better equipment than I do if I’m the owner of a factory that specializes in producing microscopes. Microscopes don’t spawn from thin air just because you have blueprints, you need to build them, and manufacturer of microscopes should take pride in quality of production, not some arbitrary “intellectual property” that I can steal 98% of by simply cutting the finished product in half with my table saw.
Oh wait, they’re doing everything in their power to prevent me from being independent after the purchase
They’re not, actually. This may be subtle nuance but they’re not actively preventing you from doing whatever you want, they’re just not assisting you to undermine their IP.
As I said, this business model is built around products having a finite service life. This microscope may have been state of the art 30 years ago, but all the R & D that’s taken place in the interim is funded by the sale of new microscopes.
This perspective is the one that is brought to you by late stage capitalism, and is pretty obviously unethical. The microscope didn’t break, your company broke it. The hardware still works, it’s still functional, your company breaking it because part of your business plan is planned obsolescence isn’t even close to something we should tolerate, and especially in a climate conscience environment should be working really hard to do away with. This is also a relatively new phenomenon, right to repair didn’t become a movement until companies started not only not supporting their products, but actively blocking attempts at support the products because of planned obsolescence and overpriced support contracts.
Which brings me to the other big problem with this comment. Everyone replying saying “no I wouldn’t do that,” including me, would probably absolutely do what you’re saying in a lot of cases. This is again, just part of capitalism. Profit must always go up, we must always feed the beast. Cultural norms now dictate this, and you can find someone justifying even the worst shit in just about every thread because our brains are so broken by this.
Our laws should take account for this. No business model should trump basic ethics. People generally fall into this behavior. If you’re outright designing it this way, please board the next rocket for the sun.
Perhaps under some kind of “intuitive ethics”. From a consequentialist perspective this model provides more R & D funding for better microscopes and is therefore the morally right action. A utilitarianist would argue that the greater public benefits from more highly developed microscopes while only the owner of the microscope benefits from opensource software.
your company breaking it
Discontinuing support is not “breaking it”. As in the OP, the owner of the microscope is still using it - it’s their responsibility support continued use, not the manufacturer.
Profit must always go up
This is a redditism and only really true of venture capital funded corporations, primarily info tech. Almost guaranteed that a microscope manufacturing company is owned by a university and as such self-sustaining profit is perfectly adequate.
our brains are so broken by this.
This is hyperbole but suppose you’re really just saying that we’re accustomed to thinking about things in a certain way. I would argue that most commenters are indeed used to thinking about things in a capitalism = evil kind of way. Certainly there are grave shortcomings of capitalism, but it is not completely without virtue. Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research. There’s an argument to be made that while the capitalist approach seems wasteful because the microscope becomes superseded, a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there’s no motivation for efficient research and development.
In many cases, discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support. As the post describes, this is going to turn perfectly functioning equipment into landfill fodder, even though the company and thus their interest, may have gone out of business and gains nothing from the device artificially being forced into a state of obsolescence. Another obvious example, though much lower stakes, would be things like single-player games requiring a server component.
Second, this assumes that this is the only possible model that keeps new R&D happening and better microscopes being made. Many companies with specialized equipment support it through things like support contracts and the like. That they don’t support them and design in them in a way that arbitrarily makes it so they can’t be self supported does suggest they are driven by profit motive and wish to increase sales not through making a better project thanks to their model support generous R&D, but by forcing more frequent purchases of equipment or in the case of like John Deere, making it significantly more costly to repair and charging exorbitant rates which you now have no choice to pay as all other avenues of repair have been now locked out.
And I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism as it can’t really have any. There are benefits to extremely well-regulated capitalism which is what my post suggests. I’ll also toss in that unregulated pure capitalism is a recipe for disaster and that while I do believe it’s possible to have an ethical business in capitalism, the reality shows over and over that the best of us aren’t likely to prevail and ethics are unlikely to win out. This is why we’ve regulated so much of capitalism whether through antitrust, labor laws, specific industry standards like food code (and even then we can see quite a lot of negative outcomes for the US compared to other countries which have stricter regulation.) Or, in a few cases simply replaced with socialist endeavors through the government (military, social security, medicare, education, etc.)
Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research.
I’d say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavor depending on which layer we’re talking about. Of course, the original invention of the WWW stemming from ARPAnet, which was a non-capitalist endeavor. The development of broadband infrastructure across the country is also the result of heavy regulation and significant taxpayer subsidy. Then we get to the servers, which are about 99% likely to be running on or relying on open-source software. We’re having this discussion on a server running an open source OS running open source software. Also worth noting that significant amounts of research happens through publicly funded state universities.
Last, I want to address this in a little more detail:
a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there’s no motivation for efficient research and development.
This is quite simply one of the most pervasive myths of capitalism, that somehow humans need to the fear of starvation or the pull of greed to do anything “productive.” Although I am sure there are some that would just as easily turn to full on hedonism, many of us not forced to labor in a capitalist society would find more beneficial things for ourselves and humanity in general because many of us have a driven curiosity. Like those opensource projects I mentioned above - I’d love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job (which tbh is probably a net-loss for humanity if I’m being honest) means I work 9+ hours a day, am stuck with an additional 1.5 hours of commute each day, and so on, such that I’m not left with the time to pursue projects like this that I’d consider beneficial. But even forgetting me, the whole open source software movement and the millions of person-hours donated to research and development is nearly entirely evidence to contrary of your thesis. What is perhaps wasteful in this case is that under capitalism, those people developing software like the one that’s allowing us to have this conversation, can’t spend the effort they’d often like to.
discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support.
On the contrary, the post is describing how they’re maintaining the equipment beyond it’s service life - it’s not broken.
Second […]
There’s no indication that the company that manufactured the microscopes does not offer support? Maybe the guy’s lab just doesn’t want to pay for it.
I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism
You literally said that discontinuing support is unethical.
I’d say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavour
If you think the last 30 years of internet tech is non-capitalist I don’t know what to say to you.
[…] I’d love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job […]
Sorry mate, you’ve kind of ranted yourself onto a tangent here.
I’m not advocating capitalism, I’m merely saying that there are reasons why things are the way that they are that commenters here seem unable to consider.
Lemmy has of course inherited reddit’s hatred of corporate profiteering. Of course we should be wary of companies pursuing profit to the detriment of the societies they function within, but that doesn’t mean that all company’s are engaging in greedy profiteering nor that all corporate behavior is an example of greedy profiteering.
I also made the incendiary claim that no one here would open source the software client for the microscope at EoL. I stand by that.
The model in question is the only one we have for oligopolies producing specialist equipment. There are few buyers, few producers, and the R&D costs are high in comparisson to volume sold.
Many commenters are making the absurd and unsupported claim that open sourcing software for older models is somehow “good customer service” that will inspire future sales. IMO this type of claim is the height of arrogance, as though any commenter here has more data and more experience than the management of these companies. As though no one at any of these companies has ever considered that open sourcing their client software might boost future sales. Of course they have considered it, and based on the market research and financial models that they have access to and we do not, they have concluded that whatever they’re doing right now is the best way forward.
As always in this kind of banter, commenters are looking for lazy generalisations on which to base their reasoning. Companies are greedy and bad. Open Source and Socialism is Good. There is always nuance that explains why things are the way they are. Sometimes corporate behavior is the result of excessive greed, but more often there are reasonable explanations.
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It’s used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
If you rely on free packages in Python for processing, those are as likely to become obsolete as anything else (if not more likely). I also really dislike the compatibility issues with different versions of different packages, the whole environment aspect. Buying new computer with different version of windows? Who knows what will work there.
In this sense for scientific computation I prefer something like MATLAB. Code written 40 years ago, most likely would still work. New computer? No problem, no configuration, just install Matlab, and it runs! Yes, it costs money, but you get what you paid for. Mathematica is another option, but I mean ugh!
I mostly use pandas that I don’t think is going anywhere, we’re also going to start tests with a library called ‘chainladder’ that is used for some actuarial reserves calculations, from everything else I’m programming custom functions because as far as I know, there’s not a lot of actuarial mathematics libraries on Python (R have much more support for that, but I prefer the flexibility of Python, like a good portion of my job is scrapping our regulatory body website for information and not sure how good R work on that).
Matlab is ugly because it’s so backwards compatible. And it only is backwards compatible until someone decides to use it to interface with external hardware that you need a specific version of some library for.
If you really don’t want to spend money, there’s always GNU Octave. Sure, it doesn’t have the thousands of matlab toolboxes, but if you’re running code from 40 years ago it shouldn’t need those anyway. I wrote a couple of scripts recently and then rewrote them slightly so that they would be compatible with octave.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who’s retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
There is genuine money to be made in learning the “dead languages” of the IT world. If you’re the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
I’ve seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it’s not worth it.
Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you’ll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that’s a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
I’d honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it’s still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
I’ve been meaning to learn Fortran in part because because of the whole “big bucks for being willing to maintain old software” thing, but mostly because I’d like to work on the sorts of scientific computing software that was (and still often is) written in Fortran.
Yeah man I’ll take plain old php and java any time of day, I can still get enough money from it to pay my lifestyle. And at 5pm I can close my laptop and play vidya with no worries.
COBOL isn’t too terrible, it has its gotchas (like sizing variables for inputs (in which you don’t need space for the datas headers and will break stuff if you do)) but mostly it’s an old language designed to be easy to use
New staff in my workplace first using COBOL (with other build experience) learn it to the point they’re productive in a week or two
This is one of those fantasies people have. You might as well hope to win the lottery.
Imagine being the only person who can play a extremely custom instrument. Unless someone absolutely needs you, you’ll be sitting and hoping to get a job. Worse, a company is more likely to hire some people to rebuild it rather than hope to find this unicorn who can do this.
Source: Been in the industry for 15yrs. I’m one of those guys you hire to migrate old software to a web app. And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.
COBOL case is bit different. You can’t just modernize millions of lines of code that is functionally unique without service disruption - and services that uses COBOL that large often tends to be very sensitive.
The fact that COBOL as a language is both atrocity to either use or read didn’t help that either.
Been in the industry for 10 years and i deeply disagree with you. I work in COBOL.
Not that migrations don’t happen, but in my experience, many, many companies kick that can down the road each year, because migrating huge and critical services is extremely costly, time-consuming and risky. In the short term, just paying people to maintain the dinosaurs is waaaay cheaper.
Also, it’s extremely easy to get a job in it ( my company now hires people with no IT background and tries to teach them cobol from scratch ), because even though it’s a niche, the demand for it still outweighs the supply of people willing to learn it.
Will it die out eventually? Maybe. I’ve been hearing about its death for a decade, so i’ve become skeptical about it in the short-term.
Edit : would also like to point out that it is indeed a fantasy that it pays truckloads of money. Does it happen? Sometimes, but you need to be really good and experienced at it.
I’d rather not dox myself, but i can tell you i’m in eastern europe working for a western european bank. COBOL is still heavily used in the banking and insurance sectors, by companies that started using it 50 years ago.
If you do manage to learn the ropes, the salary does tend to be above average for a mid-level programmer.
There is some logic to running older stuff, a lot of it is a closed system and it’s harder for threats to target it. Banks are a big one that still run a ton of our financial infrastructure on COBOL.
Hospitals also run on a ton of abandon ware, same with machine shops. Ultrasound machines that are still running 95 because for the hospital to upgrade to windows 7 or 10 is millions for a few machines. So you just airgap the systems for security.
Unfortunately, they still have parts that fail, the good news is most of its being replaced with new old stock, so not technically new stuff. I know a good number of companies that have stock piles of basically museum level hardware, to replace failing parts.
Not only does most scientific instrument software become abandonware, but there are companies that sell instruments that use the exact same components as they did 20 years ago. The only difference is now they swapped the stainless steel parts for plastic and charge luxury car prices for what will be a piece of garbage in 3 years. These pieces have nothing to do with chemical compatibility and everything to do with increasing the frequency of maintenance that the older models never needed.
piracy isn’t theft, but how do you feel about “stealing” from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers’ labor.
Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I’d rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.
The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
I had to reverse-engineer a floppy disk encryption scheme that was performed by some DOS software that directly talked to the IDE floppy controller. There’s no emulating that. A USB floppy drive can’t even be operated in the same way.
It was easier to just crack the (admittedly trivial) encryption.
You can get PCIe to PCI cards. I think PCIe is pretty much backwards compatible with PCI and only little logic is required. And PCI-X cards do work in PCI slots at reduced bandwidth.
Tho, if a system works without issue, why touch it? Only if parts become hard or expensive to come by a replacement makes sense.
I'm sure some do, but there's also a certain simplicity to "back up the Win95 machine" and "collect working Pentium 2's from eBay," particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I'm sure there's a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I've certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it's got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they'd be compatible with one.
The rant in the post has some merit to it, but the thing it sort of misses is also the reason not to use VM. It works just fine. It hasn’t been updated in 20 years because it still works. It does what it says on the box. Why put it in a VM? What would you gain from it? If you need Internet just grab a laptop and have it sit next to the main computer. That way users have a much smaller chance to break something vital. Pretty much all the control computers are air gapped anyway. No updates or anything to break things you reeeeally don’t want to break.
The only case I’ve seen VMs being used is if the old computer breakes and you can’t really find something that’s compatible with old-as-fuck software om bare metal. I work in a cleanroom and we got sooo many systems that are windows 95 or older (DOS anyone?). Electron microscope, etching systems, probe stations
The merit is security, as you can manage what goes into the VM as oppose to having the hardware where people can just plugin a flash drive or network cable.
Then there is also the improvement to not needing to maintain the old hardware, and having a backup of the entire system that you can just copy to a different system and have everything running again.
Sure I can see it being a security feature, random USBs are not a good thing, but I feel like it is quite minor with an air gapped system, no?
The backup is a good point. Though from this I started wondering how difficult it is to get the VM to communicate with old hardware. Like, the hardware might use some random method of actually communicating with the computer, ans getting that through to the VM might be problematic? I have no clue, just spitballing here.
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