Comment on abandonware empires
EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world 1 year agowho’s going to maintain it?
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.
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?
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.