14 years? [LWN.net]

14 years?

Posted Apr 24, 2003 22:12 UTC (Thu) by cwong15 (guest, #3013)
Parent article: O'Reilly First to Adopt Founders' Copyright

14 years before copyright is relinquished? This is O'Reilly we are talking about here. Will we really care about a 14 year old edition of "Java in a Nutshell" or "DNS and Bind"?

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14 years?

Posted Apr 24, 2003 22:29 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

We might. Every industry has fast and slow times. Computer industry is no exception. Futurists of the 1950s predicted that we would have flying card by now, but couldn't predict the Internet. That's because aviation was a hot topic back then. Today, making a aircraft 20% faster is a big deal, but nobody will invest billions into making a computer that is 20% faster than what we have now.

I'm sure that Java will be around in 2017, and so will DNS (although the underlying protocols may change). A lot of free software we are running today will be around. Perhaps recompiled for new processors, perhaps with stronger security embedded into the hardware and the programming language. But it will be there, and specialists will need books about that software.

14 years?

Posted Apr 25, 2003 0:26 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

How about a 14-year-old version of "sed & awk" (first edition, not on the list) in 2004 or a 14-year-old version of the X books in 2006? How about a 14-year-old version of the "make" book in 2005? The second edition of K&R (not O'Reilly) turned 14 in 2002; if it were public domain, a sourceforge project probably would have updated it for C99 by now.

Of course, the 28-year option probably actually is too long for useful documentation.

Useful sections

Posted May 1, 2003 5:25 UTC (Thu) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link]

If we're still using regular expressions in 14 years (well, 14 years after the book was
published), the sed & awk book will be useful. I still use it as my reference for regular
expressions. I can imagine other books might have similar useful sections.

14 years?

Posted Apr 25, 2003 16:19 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

14 years sound pretty good to me.

C is 34 years old.
Unix is 32 years old.
GNU is 19 years old.
"old" technology is pretty cool really.

Think of how great it would be if they had adopted this policy 14 years ago?
Pretty good yeh? well that's how good it's going to be for the next generation, they'll have a buch of good old books that can be read and updated. (plus, their openbooks section has one or two good books.)

Ciaran O'Riordan