The temporary nature of digital

I found a relic, a paper Tate and Lyle coffee bag under a floorboard. That paper bag is older than me, it made me sit down and think about life for a few moments. Digital resources are unlike my coffee bag. Resources only a few years old have a habit of disappearing entirely.

This isn’t particularly new ground, but after an evening discussing the flash games we used to play, we tried to find a few. Many are no longer accessible.

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The current state of affairs is that technology marches on at an astounding pace. Innovations in the digital sector abound; just look at the JavaScript libraries landscape that changes daily.

Looking at historical data, it seems that this will continue (how far, nobody knows). Software today leverages all the levels of abstraction below it. If I’m designing a website, I can use the browser, which in turn uses the OS’s code.

This abstraction means you have fundamental dependencies for your software. One of the games I wanted to play required Shockwave, which at one stage was ubiquitous. Today, this is rare software to run, and this means the game is actually no longer hosted, as most people wouldn’t be able to play it.

As a software developer, this is interesting to observe, as it makes you consider the shelf-life of your work. If I were a civil engineer building bridges, I could reasonably expect the structure to last a hundred years (some of the oldest bridges are thousands of years old). As a software developer, my work is likely to last around 10 years before it’s considered so archaic that it needs to be upgraded. I don’t criticize future engineers for this. When I encounter 10 year old projects, I often agree that they need updating to take advantage of the latest improvements.

It’s interesting thinking that in 10 years most of the work that I have written will start to be slowly replaced (if it hasn’t already) as improved technologies and ideas make the software I currently write obsolete.

The world is faster

It’s interesting to me that the world is faster now than ever. For example, US presidents used to be able to spend months away from the white house, that is no longer feasible as the world moves so fast. The modern world has a blistering pace of information that needs to be reacted to constantly.

The side effect is that outcomes dissipate much faster, becoming irrelevant faster than ever. In the petabytes of information generated daily, not much can actually be useful, so more information than ever is filtered out.

Can we do anything?

I think one idea is legislation that would make software public after a certain period of time. This would apply only to the specific version released at that time, allowing companies to continue innovating.

This would mean software that can no longer extract commercial value would be released to the world. For example, games that close down their online servers would be forced to release the source code allowing people to host their own if they wished to continue playing. This would also allow people to patch outdated software.

There are many practical complexities to this legislation, and more thought is needed on this front. As it may intersect with how trade secrets work in the physical world.

Overall, I think that most of the time, if a company can no longer extract value from its software, they should distribute it freely.