[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July

[Grady Booch]

i think there are two issues here: the collection of raw software 
artifacts, and the classification of that data.

in the former case, time is not on our side. for example. when i heard 
reports a few months ago that microsoft had terminated their popular 
Flight Simulator program, i wrote to Ray Ozzie, asking if we could 
preserve that code. He said he'd look into it, but I never heard back. I 
suspect that that code base may be lost to time. Frankly, I don't need a 
shared language to preserve that stuff - i need feet on the street, people 
close to projects such as these who have a place they can put such code in 
a place for safe keeping.

as for the classification of that data, my personal opinion is that we 
spend way too much energy worrying about metadata and not enough energy 
collecting. the metadata will emerge as we collect a larger and larger 
body of artifacts. get this loose confederation up and running, create 
mechanisms for collecting and preserving, and i am confident that the 
classifications will emerge organically, probably in ways we cannot a 
prior predict.

i want a community of indiana jones types who are out there fiercely 
collecting artifacts before they turn into dust. let us sort out how we 
present them along the way, for frankly, this we are breaking new ground: 
how does one present, how does one classify, how does one tell the story, 
how does one reveal the inner beauty of these objects that spring from 
human cognition and have no material manifestation other than their 
operation and some lines of code?

Grady Booch, IBM Fellow
Chief Scientist for Software Engineering, IBM Research
    Voice: (303) 986-2405 
    Fax: (303) 987-2141
    Mobile: (720) 299-8292
    E-mail: gbooch at us.ibm.com
    E-mail: egrady at booch.com
    Skype: gbooch
    Video: video.booch.com
    Web: www.handbookofsoftwarearchitecture.com
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http://slurl.com/secondlife/ThorneBridgeTown/59/154/28?title=ThorneBridgeTown&msg=IBM%20Research

    GPS: 39.6195/-105.069



From:
Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com>
To:
Tim Shoppa <shoppa at trailing-edge.com>
Cc:
scc_active at computerhistory.org
Date:
08/22/2009 07:46 AM
Subject:
Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July
Sent by:
scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org



In saying "you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software 
collection process," you express a misunderstanding.  I'm looking for 
something else--the ability of repositories and scholars to share stuff in 
those particular cases in which they want to share, and to annotate by 
links that show "interesting" relationships of stuff as well as other 
metadata, sharing those annotations without confusing them with the 
original materials.  In this, "share" might or might not involve copying.

To achieve this without limiting what any institution or individual is 
able to do and also to support building on other people's similar work 
requires that certain aspects of metadata follow common conventions.  
I.e., it helps immensely to have common methods/representations for how 
metadata is linked to data and other metadata.  E.g., a reason that you 
can productively use any library in the world is that the libraries use 
common conventions for their catalogues and for library-annotations on the 
spines of books.

Another way of saying the same thing is that a museum collection is useful 
only if it is a great deal more than a pile of stuff collected into a 
single room.  

Your "loose coalition" would not work without shared language among its 
members.  An example of shared language might be a common way of 
identifying works so that anybody can clearly see which are identical and 
which are different, and also which different ones are related to each 
other.

Best wishes, Henry

H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/   (408)867-3933


On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 05:37, Tim Shoppa <shoppa at trailing-edge.com> 
wrote:
Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is because I am disappointed that CHM some time ago quit credible
> interest in preserving software, which I regard as of commensurate
> importance to the areas that it is investing in.  This happened
> notwithstanding the fact that there are clear ways of achieving this
> relatively inexpensively and the efforts of the now-suspended volunteer
> Software Preservation Group.

A couple years ago the SPG at CHM sponsored "The Attic and the Parlor",
which made it clear to me that they appreciate the loose and broad
coalition of individuals and corporations and institutions that
preserve software.

I also got to hear some of the difficulties (esp. legal ones) and triumphs
(CHM's then-new software curator's results) of doing this in the CHM
framework.

Henry, it seems you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software
collection process through the CHM. I've come to the realization that the 
base
of interesting software "in the wild" is tremendously huge and often
extremely specialized. I think a loose coalition of software archives
and archivists, both professional and non-professional, is the right 
solution
at this point.

Tim.
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