Comment on abandonware empires
EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world 1 year agoI study in biotech and currently doing a traineeship in a university lab that likely operates in a similiar way.
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.
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
So again and again and again, I was not arguing against the abandonware issue. I take issue with how the problem is being stop-gapped in this current situation and not in some hypothetical alternate timeline.
I didn't say it isn't. I said they've had ~20 years to figure it out. You also cherry picked one possible solution I've mentioned.
Oh OK, so that makes it less complicated. I thought the assumption here is that, in general, anyone in that lab barely understands a computer or how software works. So, who's going to maintain it? Hopefully, others, sure. I actually do talk about this in other replies and how it is something I support and that, in this case, the solution is to deliver the source with the product. FOSS is fantastic. Why can't that just be done now by these same interested parties? Or are we back to "can't computer" again? Then what good is the source code anyway?
But again, that's a "what-if things were different" which isn't what I was discussing. I was discussing this specific, real and fairly common issue of attempting to maintain EOL/EOSL hardware. It is a losing game and eventually, it just isn't going to work anymore.
Alright, the source code is available for this person. Let's just say that. What now?
What can be done right now, is fairly straight forward and there are numerous step-by-step guides. That's to virtualize the environment. That is to use hardware passthru, if there is some unmentioned piece of equipment. This could be done with some old laptop or computer that you've probably tossed in the dumpster 10 years ago.
There may be an edge case where it won't work due to some embedded proprietary hardware but that's yet another hypothetical issue at stake which is to open source hardware. That's great. Who's going to make that work in a modern motherboard? The person that you've supposed can't do that because they barely understand a computer at all?
In this current reality, with the specific part of the post I am addressing, the solution currently of sustaining something ancient with diminishing supply is definitely not the answer. That is the point I was making. There is a potential of ~20 years of labor hours. There is a potential of ~20 years of portioning of budgets. And let's not forget, according to them, it is "CRITICAL" to their operations. Yet, it is maintained by a "lab guy" who may or may not have anything other than a basic understanding of computers using hardware that's no longer made and hoping to cannibalize, use second hand and find in bins somewhere.
If this "lab guy" isn't up to the task, then why are they entrusted with something so critical with nothing done about it in approximately two decades? If they are up to the task, then why isn't a solution with longevity and real risk mitigation being taken on? I don't want to discuss this because I'm not opposed to it and I believe it would be beneficial.
EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If it’s open source someone who knows about software can do it so that we don’t have to. Doesn’t even need to be a guy in the lab since he could just maintain a github repo and we’d use his thing.
Cause the instrument is important and replacing it, aside from being a massive waste of a perfectly functioning instrument, costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of € that we can’t spend just because some company decided to be shit and some dude on Lemmy said we shouldn’t use stop-gap measures for a problem that’s completely artificial.
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
Why would you need to replace the instrument? You only need to replace the computers' functions. Why does it need to cost anything other than some other old workstation tossed into an ewaste bin years ago?
As opposed to some dude on Lemmy bemoaning that there just can't be solved without source even though I've given actual solutions available now and for little to no material cost?
You have admitted that you'd still have to rely on someone else's expertise and motivation in the hopes that they'd solve the problem for the lab, yet, in my opinion, you're just discarding solutions that I've presented as if they aren't solutions at all because, at least in one of your points, that they'd have to rely on someone else's expertise and motivation in the hopes that they'd solve the problem for the lab. Even then, as I said, they've had decades to figure it out and there exist step-by-step instructions already that are freely available to help them solve the problem or get them almost to the end, assuming, there is some proprietary hardware never mentioned.
Anyway, I don't really have anything else to add to the conversation. So you can have the last word, if you wish.
EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because the company made it so it only works with its specific software. Sure maybe you could try and find a way to hack another software in it but that is significantly harder than the stop-gap measures.
Yeah well one Lemmy dude actually knows the situation and how things work around a lab and one doesn’t seem to understand. It isn’t “little to no cost” evidently or most of us sure as shit wouldn’t be dealing with stop-gap measures.
There would easily be a team of software engineers who would take on maintaining a lot of the abandonware software we use in a lab since there’s a lot of folks who still rely on that software that the company abandoned, including people who know about software more. The key difference you don’t understand is that if the source was open it wouldn’t be necessary to have an IT enthusiast in every single lab that needs it, you only need 1 or 2 to maintain a repo.
First of all, not all abandonware is decades old. Secondly, people are already using the stop-gap solutions that you’d find on the internet, like never connecting the computer to the internet and pray nothing breaks, for example.