Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

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Proprietary is exactly the problem here. Your work can die at the whim of a corporation.

It gets even worse with product activation.

Even if something is proprietary but without activation, you can sort of preserve it. I can spin up an old version of WordStar in MS-DOS on my computer, and open up old WordStar documents. I can start up Windows 3.1 if I want in a VM. It's not as good as something open like LaTeX, but it's not completely useless.

If you use Adobe CS, and Adobe goes under, changes business models, or takes down its activation servers for any reasons, your life's work might be dead. Few corporations survive forever. Even fewer products do. That's why a lot of us avoid rights-managed or some types of cloud-based software for critical work (although a lot of cloud-based has very good export options, so I don't hesitate to use e.g. Google Docs).

Proprietary was all you had back in 2000:s -- And in this case, Adobe is still live and kicking. For a company who made $2.95B on net income last year, pish.

To execute a kill switch of "you are never allowed to run flash again" is far from fair, Adobe is the problem. However I will agree to differ; your work can die at the whim of a corporation.

Nah. In 2000, you could do what you wanted with Java Applets. Plus, you had desktop apps and all sorts of other options too. Was Flash technically better for a lot of uses? Without a doubt. But that's a choice one makes. At the time, I chose open (or at least more open), and I'm glad I did.

And Adobe is still alive, as are others like IBM, Microsoft, and friends. On the other hand, SGI, DEC, Sybase, Novell, SCO, and tons of other companies are dead. And some companies, like HP, are technically alive, but all their product lines from that era are dead.

Getting burned once or twice is enough to understand that the organizational, political, and human sides tend to matter more than the technical. Older folks tend to chose stable, open solutions. Younger folks who haven't gone through that yet tend to chose technically glitzy solutions.

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