Open source as software obsolescence insurance

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Jul. 07, 2006

Lance Ulanoff, my colleague at PC Magazine, has a problem. One of his favorite applications is the Macromedia vector-based drawing tool, Freehand. Those of you who pay close attention to software as a business already know where this tale is going.

Macromedia was bought out by Adobe Systems last year. Guess who owns Freehand's chief rival, Illustrator? Why, yes, it's Adobe.

So, Lance went in to talk to Adobe about their plans for Freehand... I'll make a long story short: the future doesn't look good for Freehand.

He has had the same kind of experience with other programs like Sonic's MyDVD and Day-Timer Organizer.

In the first case, Sonic has radically changed the program's interface, and he's not at all happy with the "improved" version. In the second case, the program was simply abandoned by its maker.

I feel his pain.

I still have WordStar commands embedded in my fingers. I used this popular word-processor from the early 80s when I ran it on CP/M KayPro computers and well into the 90s with versions for MS-DOS and Windows. It was, and as far as I'm concerned, still is the word-processor for touch typists.

And, then there was Lotus Organizer. For me, there still isn't an address and date organizer program to equal it.

Today, these programs are as dead as the dodo bird. I keep running them -- WordStar 7.0c from 1989 and Lotus Organizer 6.0, a mere youngster dating from 1999 -- but then I'm a bit of a fanatic.

I can manage this, because I know how to migrate these obsolete programs from one PC to another. I suspect Lance will be doing the same thing with Freehand MX.

Still, at the same time, I also have the vi editor commands in my fingertips. I picked it up on Unix around 1981, the same time I picked up WordStar. What can I say; I've always used multiple operating systems.

The big difference is that I can still find vi, or its updated cousin vim, on any Linux or Unix system in the land.

Why? Because open-source software can never really die. All those other programs are closed-source, and sooner or later they can, and do, die.

If you don't think that can happen to your favorite proprietary program, think again.

There was a time when WordStar owned the word-processor market. Now, it's just part of PC history. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, created the business PC market. It's dust now.

If you really want to be sure that your favorite program will be around not just today but ten years from now, you'd be better darn certain that it's open-source. If it's not, well, good-luck. You're going to need it.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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