Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I’d rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It’s used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
If you rely on free packages in Python for processing, those are as likely to become obsolete as anything else (if not more likely). I also really dislike the compatibility issues with different versions of different packages, the whole environment aspect. Buying new computer with different version of windows? Who knows what will work there.
In this sense for scientific computation I prefer something like MATLAB. Code written 40 years ago, most likely would still work. New computer? No problem, no configuration, just install Matlab, and it runs! Yes, it costs money, but you get what you paid for. Mathematica is another option, but I mean ugh!
I mostly use pandas that I don’t think is going anywhere, we’re also going to start tests with a library called ‘chainladder’ that is used for some actuarial reserves calculations, from everything else I’m programming custom functions because as far as I know, there’s not a lot of actuarial mathematics libraries on Python (R have much more support for that, but I prefer the flexibility of Python, like a good portion of my job is scrapping our regulatory body website for information and not sure how good R work on that).
If you really don’t want to spend money, there’s always GNU Octave. Sure, it doesn’t have the thousands of matlab toolboxes, but if you’re running code from 40 years ago it shouldn’t need those anyway. I wrote a couple of scripts recently and then rewrote them slightly so that they would be compatible with octave.
Matlab is ugly because it’s so backwards compatible. And it only is backwards compatible until someone decides to use it to interface with external hardware that you need a specific version of some library for.
Regarding “the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new”, I’ll invoke Hanlon’s razor.
I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.
They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.
And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.
Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it’s developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).
Yup somebody suggest that person VTK(open source) for the person in the post
Games publishers are in a war of attention and don’t want to compete with themselves. They won’t sell you an old game if they can get you hooked on the new version with microtransactions and DLC with no story and sub-par multiplayer.
The next point is just making the case for open source.
Some companies just make their new version compelling. You can’t get the experience of Balders Gate 3 by playing Balders Gate 1.
I think they’re all competing with themselves anyway, the biggest customer group for Whatever 5 will be players of Whatever 4. Giving away Whatever 1, 2, and 3 will increase sales of 4 and 5
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe
I’m not a programmer or anything, but I’ve heard decompilers have gotten better over the years.
The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
The rant in the post has some merit to it, but the thing it sort of misses is also the reason not to use VM. It works just fine. It hasn’t been updated in 20 years because it still works. It does what it says on the box. Why put it in a VM? What would you gain from it? If you need Internet just grab a laptop and have it sit next to the main computer. That way users have a much smaller chance to break something vital. Pretty much all the control computers are air gapped anyway. No updates or anything to break things you reeeeally don’t want to break.
The only case I’ve seen VMs being used is if the old computer breakes and you can’t really find something that’s compatible with old-as-fuck software om bare metal. I work in a cleanroom and we got sooo many systems that are windows 95 or older (DOS anyone?). Electron microscope, etching systems, probe stations
The merit is security, as you can manage what goes into the VM as oppose to having the hardware where people can just plugin a flash drive or network cable.
Then there is also the improvement to not needing to maintain the old hardware, and having a backup of the entire system that you can just copy to a different system and have everything running again.
Sure I can see it being a security feature, random USBs are not a good thing, but I feel like it is quite minor with an air gapped system, no?
The backup is a good point. Though from this I started wondering how difficult it is to get the VM to communicate with old hardware. Like, the hardware might use some random method of actually communicating with the computer, ans getting that through to the VM might be problematic? I have no clue, just spitballing here.
I’m sure some do, but there’s also a certain simplicity to “back up the Win95 machine” and “collect working Pentium 2’s from eBay,” particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I’m sure there’s a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I’ve certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it’s got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they’d be compatible with one.
You can get PCIe to PCI cards. I think PCIe is pretty much backwards compatible with PCI and only little logic is required. And PCI-X cards do work in PCI slots at reduced bandwidth.
Tho, if a system works without issue, why touch it? Only if parts become hard or expensive to come by a replacement makes sense.
I don’t know how we can’t legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just… throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it’s going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it’s just garbage.
When Windows dropped support for XP, our NMR lab decided to change the OS of the PC linked to the NMR machine to Linux. Since I don’t work there anymore I don’t know if they were able to do that successfully.
Gotta save this one
Alright I know this is going to get some hate and I fully support emulation and an overhaul of US copyright and patent law but the justmeremember’s supportive post is just bad. This is the same bad practice that many organizations, especially manufacturing, have problems with. If the ~20 years of raw data is so important, then why is it sitting on decades passed end-of-life stuff?
If it is worth the investment, then why not invest in a way to convert the data into something less dependent on EOL software? There’s lots of ways, cheap and not to do this.
But even worse, I bet there ‘raw’ data that’s only a year old still sitting on those machines. I don’t know if the ‘lab guy’ actually pulls a salary or not but maybe hire someone to begin trying to actually solve the problem instead of maintaining an eventual losing game?
In ~20 years they couldn’t be cutting slivers from the budget to eventually invest in something that would perhaps ‘reset the clock?’
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to find a post of them complaining about Excel being too slow and unstable because they’ve been using it as a database for ~20 years worth of data at this point either.
Ah. So…blame the victim. Cause apparently capitalism is, like, perfect or something.
The company selling the software arbitrarily created a problem for no reason other than greed. And yet, the ones not forking over more money are the problem.
Yeah, hard no from me on your entire argument, buddy.
I didn’t say capitalism is perfect nor did I imply it.
So hypothetically let’s say the vendor lost the rights to the software since it is abandonware – great. I’d love it.
What changes for justmeremember’s situation? Nothing changes.
I suppose your only issue here is that the software vendor or some entity should support it forever. OK, so why didn’t they just choose a FOSS alternative or make one themselves? If not then, why not now? There is nothing that stops them from the latter other than time and effort. Even better, everyone else could benefit!
Does that make justmeremember just as culpable here or are they still the victim with no reasonable way to a solution?
I posted simply because this specific issue is much too common and also just as common is the failure to actually solve it regardless of the abandonware argument instead of stop-gapping and kicking it down the line until access to the data is gone forever.
Because they’re a science research lab not a computer programming lab? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying but they’re not the right people, nor in the right situation to be solving this problem.
It isn’t necessarily a computer programming problem either. Rather it is an IT problem at least in part, one that the poster states is the primary job of his ‘lab guy’ – to maintain two ancient Windows 95 computers specifically. That person must know enough to sustain the troubleshooting and replacement of the hardware and certainly at least the transfer of data from the own spinning hard drives. Why not instead put that technical expertise into actually solving the problem long-term? Why not just run both in qemu and use hardware passthru if required? At least then, you would rid yourself of the ticking time-bomb of hardware and its diminishing availability. That RAM that is no longer made isn’t going to last forever. They don’t even need to know much about how it all works. There are guides, even for Windows 95 available.
Perhaps there are other hurdles such as running something on ISA but even so, eventually it isn’t going to matter. Primarily, it seems rather the hurdle is specifically the software and the data it facilitates though. Does it really have some sort of ancient hardware dependency? Maybe. But in all that time of this ‘lab guy’ who’s main role is just these two machines must have some time to experiment and figure this out. The data must be copyable, even as a straight hard drive image even if it isn’t a flat file (extremely doubtful but it doesn’t matter). I mean the data is by the author’s own emphasis CRITICAL.
If it is CRITICAL then why don’t they give it that priority, even to the lone ‘lab guy’ that’s acting IT?
Unless there’s some big edge case here that just isn’t simply said and there is something above and beyond simply just the software they speak about, I feel like I’ve put more effort into typing these responses than it would take to effectively solve the hardware on life support side of it. Solving the software dependency side? Depending on how the datasets are logically stored it may require a software developer but it also may not. However, simply virtualizing the environment would solve many, if not all, of these problems with minimal investment, especially to CRITICAL (their emphasis) data with ~20 years to figure it out. It would simply be a new computer and some sort of media to install Linux or *BSD on and perhaps a COTS converter if it is using something like an LPT interface or even a DB9/DE-9 D-Sub (though you can still find modern motherboards, cards or even laptops capable of supporting those but also certainly a cheap USB adapter as well).
Anyway, I’m just going to leave it at that, I think I’ve said a lot on the subject to numerous people and do not have much more to add other than this is most likely solvable and outside of severe edge cases, solvable without expert knowledge considering the timeframe.
In a GxP environment with bespoke pharmaceutical equipment you are spending anywhere from 1-4000 collective labour hours and anywhere from 50k-250k for a control system upgrade, URS/TRS/SDS, Code risk assessment and review, and Qualification. To give you an idea, on a therapeutic manufacturing plant you’re looking at a handful of two inch binders for the end to end system.
You are also (and more importantly) taking your resources off BAU or revenue generating improvement work for this project. You have a validated and qualified system, and even if you are spending $10-20k for a $500 like for like IPC or control card, the cost benefits of another 5 years is worth it.
If your equipment is a medical device, such as a diagnostic microscope, add another few binders of paperwork and regulator sign off. There’s a reason the equipment is so expensive
If you get into the food industry, or general manufacturing the barriers to upgrade are much less. For your machine shop running floppy disks, it’s a case of the external cost would approach the cost of a new machine, and the existing machine is fine.
As a maintenance professional this is the sort of risk management we conduct on an ongoing basis.
Obviously the company is the bad guy here. But if the research data is so important, the lab should try to solve their problem instead of just praying that the 20 year old machine won’t fail.
Because it’s often not worth the investment. You would pay a shit ton for a one time conversion of data that is still accessible.
If the software became open source, because the company abandoned it, then that cost could potentially be brought down significantly.
You are also missing the parts where functional hardware loses support. Which is even worse in my opinion.
Because it’s often not worth the investment. You would pay a shit ton for a one time conversion of data that is still accessible.
Still accessible for now and less likely to be accessible as the clock ticks and less likely that there is compatible hardware to replace.
If it isn’t worth the investment, then what’s the problem here? So what if the data is lost? It obviously isn’t worth it.
If the software became open source, because the company abandoned it, then that cost could potentially be brought down significantly.
OK but that isn’t a counter point to what I said. If the hardware never fails, there is no problem either. What does that matter? And who cares if it was FOSS (though I am a FOSS advocate). What if nobody maintains it?
It doesn’t matter because these aren’t the reality of the problems that this person is dealing with. Why not make some FOSS that takes care of the issue and runs on something that isn’t on borrowed time and can endure not only hardware changes but operating system changes? That’d be relevant. It goes back to my point doesn’t it? Why not hire this person.
Clean room reverse engineering has case law precedent that essentially make this low risk legally (certainly nil if the right’s holder is defunct).
You are also missing the parts where functional hardware loses support. Which is even worse in my opinion.
I didn’t miss the point. I even made the point of having at least ~20 years to plan for it in the budget. Also the hardware has already lost support or there wouldn’t be an issue, would there? You could just keep sustaining it without relying on a diminishing supply.
Or are we talking about some hypothetical hardware that wasn’t mentioned? I guess I would have missed that point since it was never made.
Edit: lol, I haven’t realised I’m not in a video game subforum. But my point stands and I agree that old software should be pirated or downloaded for free if the proprietor is a jackass that no longer provide support but still try to milk every cent from a dead horse.
Devil’s advocate: old games don’t have great quality of life improvements that we take for granted today and having remakes could fix the issues.
I played Civilizations 3 again and even though the graphics still hold up quite well by today’s standards, the UI doesn’t hold a candle to the later releases. Suffice to say, I won’t be playing Civ 3 again despite having grown up with the game. Old games like Civ 3 requires you to have like OCD and be extremely patient, which is something you can’t really have as an adult with less time to play videogames. There are old games that would require retouching-- without the baggage of parasitic modern trends of course like DLshit and microtransactions.
IP shouldn’t exist in general.
A monopoly is thought to inspire creation, if that’s so IP is good, but should be on human timescales.
100 years of monopoly won’t inspire me any better than 20 years, and even most cooperate products have less time in production than that
I wonder what kind of lab that is.
Its incredibly wasteful, but there is another perspective.
When that microscope was purchased, it formed part of someone’s budget throughout its service life. Support would have been guaranteed for that service life, but that life has now expired.
The company isn’t obligated to assist buyers beyond that service life, and doing so would eat into current and future profits.
There is not a single commenter (nor downvoter) in this thread who would open the source for that microscope if they owned that microscope company.
Companies used to release switchboard schematics and detailed instructions on how to maintain an repair their products all the time. Products becoming unrepairable and unsupported is a relatively new trend.
That’s why people are now trying to get the government involved to reverse that trend and go back to the old times where you had access to everything you needed to maintain your equipment.
There is absolutely no doubt that a $250k piece of lab equipment came with a detailed service manual.
Providing eternal software updates and support is not the same as providing a service manual.
This perspective is the one that is brought to you by late stage capitalism, and is pretty obviously unethical. The microscope didn’t break, your company broke it. The hardware still works, it’s still functional, your company breaking it because part of your business plan is planned obsolescence isn’t even close to something we should tolerate, and especially in a climate conscience environment should be working really hard to do away with. This is also a relatively new phenomenon, right to repair didn’t become a movement until companies started not only not supporting their products, but actively blocking attempts at support the products because of planned obsolescence and overpriced support contracts.
Which brings me to the other big problem with this comment. Everyone replying saying “no I wouldn’t do that,” including me, would probably absolutely do what you’re saying in a lot of cases. This is again, just part of capitalism. Profit must always go up, we must always feed the beast. Cultural norms now dictate this, and you can find someone justifying even the worst shit in just about every thread because our brains are so broken by this.
Our laws should take account for this. No business model should trump basic ethics. People generally fall into this behavior. If you’re outright designing it this way, please board the next rocket for the sun.
pretty obviously unethical
Perhaps under some kind of “intuitive ethics”. From a consequentialist perspective this model provides more R & D funding for better microscopes and is therefore the morally right action. A utilitarianist would argue that the greater public benefits from more highly developed microscopes while only the owner of the microscope benefits from opensource software.
your company breaking it
Discontinuing support is not “breaking it”. As in the OP, the owner of the microscope is still using it - it’s their responsibility support continued use, not the manufacturer.
Profit must always go up
This is a redditism and only really true of venture capital funded corporations, primarily info tech. Almost guaranteed that a microscope manufacturing company is owned by a university and as such self-sustaining profit is perfectly adequate.
our brains are so broken by this.
This is hyperbole but suppose you’re really just saying that we’re accustomed to thinking about things in a certain way. I would argue that most commenters are indeed used to thinking about things in a capitalism = evil kind of way. Certainly there are grave shortcomings of capitalism, but it is not completely without virtue. Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research. There’s an argument to be made that while the capitalist approach seems wasteful because the microscope becomes superseded, a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there’s no motivation for efficient research and development.
In many cases, discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support. As the post describes, this is going to turn perfectly functioning equipment into landfill fodder, even though the company and thus their interest, may have gone out of business and gains nothing from the device artificially being forced into a state of obsolescence. Another obvious example, though much lower stakes, would be things like single-player games requiring a server component.
Second, this assumes that this is the only possible model that keeps new R&D happening and better microscopes being made. Many companies with specialized equipment support it through things like support contracts and the like. That they don’t support them and design in them in a way that arbitrarily makes it so they can’t be self supported does suggest they are driven by profit motive and wish to increase sales not through making a better project thanks to their model support generous R&D, but by forcing more frequent purchases of equipment or in the case of like John Deere, making it significantly more costly to repair and charging exorbitant rates which you now have no choice to pay as all other avenues of repair have been now locked out.
And I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism as it can’t really have any. There are benefits to extremely well-regulated capitalism which is what my post suggests. I’ll also toss in that unregulated pure capitalism is a recipe for disaster and that while I do believe it’s possible to have an ethical business in capitalism, the reality shows over and over that the best of us aren’t likely to prevail and ethics are unlikely to win out. This is why we’ve regulated so much of capitalism whether through antitrust, labor laws, specific industry standards like food code (and even then we can see quite a lot of negative outcomes for the US compared to other countries which have stricter regulation.) Or, in a few cases simply replaced with socialist endeavors through the government (military, social security, medicare, education, etc.)
Funding for research is extraordinarily difficult under socialism for example. The inherent sink or swim mandate of capitalism ensures productive research.
I’d say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavor depending on which layer we’re talking about. Of course, the original invention of the WWW stemming from ARPAnet, which was a non-capitalist endeavor. The development of broadband infrastructure across the country is also the result of heavy regulation and significant taxpayer subsidy. Then we get to the servers, which are about 99% likely to be running on or relying on open-source software. We’re having this discussion on a server running an open source OS running open source software. Also worth noting that significant amounts of research happens through publicly funded state universities.
Last, I want to address this in a little more detail:
a socialist approach would also be wasteful because there’s no motivation for efficient research and development.
This is quite simply one of the most pervasive myths of capitalism, that somehow humans need to the fear of starvation or the pull of greed to do anything “productive.” Although I am sure there are some that would just as easily turn to full on hedonism, many of us not forced to labor in a capitalist society would find more beneficial things for ourselves and humanity in general because many of us have a driven curiosity. Like those opensource projects I mentioned above - I’d love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job (which tbh is probably a net-loss for humanity if I’m being honest) means I work 9+ hours a day, am stuck with an additional 1.5 hours of commute each day, and so on, such that I’m not left with the time to pursue projects like this that I’d consider beneficial. But even forgetting me, the whole open source software movement and the millions of person-hours donated to research and development is nearly entirely evidence to contrary of your thesis. What is perhaps wasteful in this case is that under capitalism, those people developing software like the one that’s allowing us to have this conversation, can’t spend the effort they’d often like to.
discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support.
On the contrary, the post is describing how they’re maintaining the equipment beyond it’s service life - it’s not broken.
Second […]
There’s no indication that the company that manufactured the microscopes does not offer support? Maybe the guy’s lab just doesn’t want to pay for it.
I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism
You literally said that discontinuing support is unethical.
I’d say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavour
If you think the last 30 years of internet tech is non-capitalist I don’t know what to say to you.
[…] I’d love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job […]
Sorry mate, you’ve kind of ranted yourself onto a tangent here.
I’m not advocating capitalism, I’m merely saying that there are reasons why things are the way that they are that commenters here seem unable to consider.
Lemmy has of course inherited reddit’s hatred of corporate profiteering. Of course we should be wary of companies pursuing profit to the detriment of the societies they function within, but that doesn’t mean that all company’s are engaging in greedy profiteering nor that all corporate behavior is an example of greedy profiteering.
I also made the incendiary claim that no one here would open source the software client for the microscope at EoL. I stand by that.
The model in question is the only one we have for oligopolies producing specialist equipment. There are few buyers, few producers, and the R&D costs are high in comparisson to volume sold.
Many commenters are making the absurd and unsupported claim that open sourcing software for older models is somehow “good customer service” that will inspire future sales. IMO this type of claim is the height of arrogance, as though any commenter here has more data and more experience than the management of these companies. As though no one at any of these companies has ever considered that open sourcing their client software might boost future sales. Of course they have considered it, and based on the market research and financial models that they have access to and we do not, they have concluded that whatever they’re doing right now is the best way forward.
As always in this kind of banter, commenters are looking for lazy generalisations on which to base their reasoning. Companies are greedy and bad. Open Source and Socialism is Good. There is always nuance that explains why things are the way they are. Sometimes corporate behavior is the result of excessive greed, but more often there are reasonable explanations.
I would. Not only would I do so voluntarily, but I also support STRONG consumer protection laws that would force any product or software or copyright or patent into public domain the instant it’s been unavailable for sale for 3 or more years or has gone without update for 5 years.
Our public domain and consumer protections are pathetic, and should be vigorously bolstered and defended.
I don’t think you’ve really thought this through.
If you force a company to continue support they will just give it a stupid price tag. “Sure we will continue to support this $250k microscope, if you would like us to write a windows 11 client for you that will cost $1m.”
That sort of thing already happens in the enterprise world. If it gets maintained because a customer wants to pay for that entirely, it happens.
But if they abandon it, even unintentionally, then it needs to become public domain.
I think you missed my point.
I’m saying that you can’t legislate that abandoned software must become public domain. If you asked a company whether it was abandoned they would just say yes it’s still supported, with a completely impractical price tag for support.
I 100% would. It’s short term loss for long term gain.
Which microscope are you going to buy? The one with the software that’s company supported through it’s amortization period and then community supported afterwards, or the one where you’re sol after it’s paid off?Goodness me.
Of course you’re going to buy the one where “you’re sol after it’s service life” because that’s the one who’s manufacturer has been able to afford to invest in any R & D.
All things being equal, if there’s a company who’s model is some kind of eternal service life and another with a limited service life obviously the latter will be a better product.
Most commenters here are talking about a lab budget in the same way you’d manage household finance in some kind of “buy it for life” philosophy which is just not how org budgets work. Managers don’t work on a life long time scale, they want the best results from projects with limited scope. You buy the best microscope that you can afford, not the one which is going to have continued support 20 years after you’ve left the org.
Lots of labs don’t need the highest end equipment, and the ones that do could sell the old ones.
That would work if we didn’t have everything set up to throw out, which is a different problem all together. I’ve worked in IT procurement for a fairly big corporation, and I’ve seen dumpsters filled with slightly old iPhones because it made more sense to accounting.
Support or lose to public domain.
Sure, support costs $1m per annum.
But think of the shareholders!
They can’t make huge profits if we don’t scam our customers by forcing to upgrade their perfectly fine equipment. We need planned obsolescence to be this greedy, damn it!
@DogMuffins @fossilesque There are many companies that are happy to support their products for decades *for a price*.
That’s what I’m saying.
You can’t force a company to support something. They will just quote an unreasonable price for support.