Re: [xml-dev] The year is 2027, and we need to examine archived XMLdocum

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>]

Len Bullard wrote:
> Yes, legal documents in old formats will be handled not because of any
> particular business model but because an active agency, human or digital,
> maintains the rabbit trail.  But here is the controversy: where content is
> king, open source is often second rate.  Note that IBM announced it would
> contribute to ODF, but they also stated they would not offer support for it.
> That isn't a very good deal for their customers and it is deadly to the
> lifecycle unless support is purchased elsewhere (internally using local
> staff or from external agencies; see RedHat). 
>
> I'm a fan of open source and freebies in general, but high value content
> often requires paying for the quality at point of creation and over the
> lifecycle.  Being able to retrieve a failed technology from the archives is
> the cost of a bad bet made by someone who had the job before you did.
>   

OK, I'll bite. How can using open source with open, well-documented xml 
formats be a negative here? Few closed-source systems have done a very 
good job of providing open formats suitable for data archival. Some open 
source systems have.

In 2027, I will probably just want to extract the data as XML, but if I 
need more, nobody will have the versions of closed source software used 
to create data today. With closed source, they won't have access to the 
source code either. Of course, I'm all for well-supported software, and 
my company is very much in the software support business, but a support 
contract in 2007 doesn't ensure that you'll be able to read anything in 
2027.

Jonathan