Saturday, 04. January 2003
Programs with commercial value after a long time.
Last Summer I spent my way back from the H2K2 conference digging in old source code from BSD, mostly FreeBSD and Darwin, but also some bits and pieces from the Net/2 tapes. I was interested in the evolution of the kernel interfaces ifconfig(8) uses. (Compare the features of BSD 4.3 vs a modern BSD). Assuming that Apple took NeXTStep sources and NeXTStep regularly merged features from BSD is seemed to me that considerable parts of the MacOS X/Darwin/NeXTstep Unix branch haven't been touched since the early 90ies.
A little later Professor Lessing wrote:
I don't have much code on my box that's been unmodified for more than 10 years. I certainly don't know of any I can buy from the original software developer. Thus, it doesn't seem that there's a huge market out there of developers depending on selling 10 year old code. And thus, it doesn't seem plausible that there are many developers who would decide not to code just because they couldn't sell their unmodified code for more than 10 years.
I sent him my observations which part wise contradicted his assumption. This is not really relevant, because the 'old code' in MacOS X seems only the stuff which is a) freely available from Apple and other sources and b) not the part creates a competitive advantage for Apple. (The Aqua GUI and Quicktime are) But nevertheless it is nice to have some empirical data. I suspect other commercial Software also contains some very old code still in use.
Now I found another piece of very old code still of commercial relevance: Sim City and friends. If I recall right this software was first published in the late nineties. While it is nowadays available on many web sites as abandonware, it is still being sold for 5 US$ regarding to messages on this pages.
On this occasion I have to wonder why Lessing's book 'the future of
ideas' does not mention the term 'abandonware' ... at least in the
index. Game software seems to me a perfect example for the problems of
modern copyright. Game publishers go out of business all the time,
games are never updated, games are still usable after years. (Using
Wordstar in 2003 does not seem desirable, playing 'Zork' on the
other hand is still a reasonable way to kill time).
11.6.-13.6.: Düsseldorf, DE: 17. DFN-Arbeitstagung
Paper zur 17. DFN Arbeitstagung können bis zum 15.1.2003 eingereicht werden.
disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif
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