Simson Garfinkel thinks that open-source is the key
to fighting digital decay.
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16480,294,p1.html
Simson Garfinkel, yes, his thoughtful comments consistently compel one's attention
"These days, it's relatively easy to understand which formats will survive and be readable in 20 years' time and which are likely to go the way of the eight-track tape.
"The key to survival, it turns out, is openness. File formats that are published and can be implemented without payment of a licensing fee – formats, that is, that embody the principles of open-source software – survive, because knowledge about how to read them can be freely incorporated into many applications. Other file formats die when the companies behind them stumble."
(...)
"JPEG, meanwhile, is widely used by millions of digital cameras and practically every computer that's sold today. I cannot imagine a future computer system that could not read the JPEG file format."
(((Well, I can sure imagine such a computer. Because commercial entities are still in the business of selling locked formats, and even in the business of deliberately obsolescing formats so that they can sell you the same IP-content all over again. Logic is on Simson's side, but WIPO, the political class and the police are on the side of the multinats (with the possible exception of dodgy Venezuela).
Companies do "stumble," but open-source has a host of poswer-brokers sticking landmines into its way. So imagine inventing, twenty years from now, a clipper-chipped "trusted computing" platform with a unique "anti-terrorist" Chinese-Friendly Internet Address, that would simply alert the local commissars if you tried to download a jpeg. You'd be urged to download the new, advanced, groovy, micropaymented WIPO-pegs, suitable to tomorrow's clean, efficient, virus-free, fully-marketized Internet. Actually, it probably wouldn't even present that as a choice. It would probably just automagically nagware you until you fell into line, in much the way this Apple always struggles to save stuff in the ludicrous .tiff format.
I'm not saying this is likely. I'm saying it's not hard to IMAGINE it. If they thought they could make that happen, the Chinese and Saudis would deploy that system right now. Hey, you got ports in and out of your computer; maybe they just buy the ports.
