Re: Abandoning property (Was: Copyright Extension Bill Passes Congress)

On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Dan L. Burk <burkdanl[_at_]shu.edu> wrote:
>
> Perhaps I am misunderstanding this comment -- if it actually means
> what it says, it appears to reflect an extremely niave view of how
> technological advances occur, especially in computer science. The
> programs almost certainly lose their value in a few *months* rather
> than a few years, but are nonetheless sequestered for another 69
> years, during which developers could otherwise be learning from
> them, improving them, etc. In other words, it almost certainly
> harms further development.

I don't know your experience in the computer industry, but mine tells me that while 70 years may be a long time to expect source code to be useful, 10 years certainly isn't, nor in some cases is 30 or 40.

Great chunks of the older operating systems haven't been rewritten in decades. I'm writing this on a UNIX workstation; the copyrights for the operating system source code go back to 1979.

There is a thriving niche market in C/PM applications, all running on an operating system compiled from source code 15 or more years old.

The main cause of the Y2K problem is that major corporations are using source code written several decades ago. Even solving the Y2K problem will not result in all that code being rewritten, only the troublesome portions of it. Critical functions of our largest corporations will still be running from decades-old source code well into the next millenium.

When a new version of an application is released, the whole code isn't rewritten. Instead, there is new code for the new features but only such changes to the old code as are necessary to support the new features. In the microcomputer world, applications like PageMaker, FileMaker, Word and WordPerfect have been around for more than a decade. Rarely are they rewritten top to bottom. About the only time they are is when the programming language in which the source code is written can no longer be stretched to provide the latest features. According to the Microsoft people I've talked with, Word and Excel, for instance, were using much of the same code they started out with in the pre-Windows days. It's only in the last year or so that Microsoft has undertaken to rewrite the applications wholesale, in Visual Basic, I believe.

Programmers use identical blocks of source code in different applications. They'll have code that displays a certain dialog, for instance, or which performs a certain function, and they'll put that code in numerous applications.

Then there's source code at the chip level ...

• Mike Bradley National Writers Union <mike[_at_]sphinx.com>