Re: <nettime> Goodbye Classic ?

[Kazys Varnelis <kazys@audc.org>]

Alas, our beloved Open Source code doesn't stay stable forever either.

Take, for example, PHP/Mysql. Work being done in PHP and Mysql today
may well be broken utterly the next time an ISP decides to upgrade
your server as happened during the recent and largely-unremarked about
trouble during upgrades from 4.1 to 5.0. The default encoding had been
Latin1 with Swedish Collation (where Mysql's developers are) to the
more universal UTF8. Unfortunately the upgrade didn't go as planned.
The way that certain characters such as accents and "smart" quotes
were encoded in Latin1-Swedish did not allow for easy translation
during that upgrade. The result is that your site would suddenly have
euro symbols in the middle of words and so on. If worst came to worst,
your site wouldn't even function. Many, many sites suffered from this
during the last year and there have been few solutions.

I don't mean to defend Apple, but these issues of digital preservation  
are huge and ongoing. Open Source is far from a panacea for them.

Kazys Varnelis





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