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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

You can track the environment all you want, but you still have to modify your software when the environment changes.

If your software has a web page, browsers are not under your control. You don't know what the next version of Firefox is going to do.

If your software runs on any cloud service, you don't know what they're going to do.

Also, even if the software stayed the same, business requirements will change. New security holes will be discovered. Customer expectations will change. Who knows, maybe IPv6 will finally happen?

Freezing your software is not an option for most people. The Internet is not done yet and it's not going to be done anytime soon.

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I agree with all this:) I also enjoyed the article, "free as in baby" is a great phrase.

At the same time I think it's important to note that the entropy analogy is just an analogy. Software is not actually subject to the laws of entropy (at least no more than a book or a poem is). Sure, often we want to change programs for various reasons -- that's not entropy.

Most fields have to deal with actual entropy -- the fact that we don't should be super exciting. See chubot's adject comment for just some of the things this makes possible.

It's possible that we will reach a point in computing history where we can run all historical software, and that this state of affairs will continue indefinitely. It just requires enough manpower put into "bootstrapping" of hardware in software (emulation). A decentralized Internet file system might help too.

In other words, the "digital dark age" [1] for code (in addition to documents) doesn't need to last forever.

You might compare it to things like farming, metallurgy, or plumbing. Many things in those areas were invented independently in different geographical areas, and some were altogether forgotten and reinvented later. But now we've reached a point in civilization where we're not going to forget them, because we have libraries, the Internet, and so forth.

Likewise, at some point we should stop forgetting how to run old software as well. Old software can be made runnable now through conscious effort, but the "default" is still for it to rot and be forgotten.

For web pages, the Internet Archive only does the server side... there does need to be an archive of web browsers as well, and there probably will be some day. I have no idea when that will be, but I think it will happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

That's a great effort. Though their mission isn't exactly what I am describing, it's definitely on the way.

It seems like it is mostly about collecting source code at this point. But the harder problem is the build and runtime environments (and how to "bottom them out"). Without the ability to execute it, source code has limited utility.

"Given that any software component may turn out to be essential in the future, we do not make distinctions and collect all software that is publicly available in source code form."

The Debian snapshot service keeps binary packages too:

http://snapshot.debian.org/

The Ubuntu Launchpad system has something similar.

Fedora's build servers keep all packages for eternity IIRC.

If your software runs on a CPU, those are not under your control :)

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