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.
Many years ago, I worked for a software company that included code escrow for our customers. If something happened to is, they could unlock the code and support it themselves.
It can be done, but probably only is in industries with strong companies for customers
There is also open source software.
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.
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.
Kinda off topic but he should just convert those Windows 95 computers to a virtual machine
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 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.
Wanna bet?
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.
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.
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