PREFORMA Open Source Workshop

Free Software and Open Formats:
Virtual immortality and independence for digital archives

Stockholm, 07. April 2016

Hello ;-)

Well, what actually is "Open Source"?

Common misassumptions:

• Open Source = Freeware
• Must be non-commercial
• Is nerdy and non-user friendly
• This strange "Lunax" system...?

So Open Source is actually about YOUR user freedom...

Free Software

Free as in free speech!

Free Software

Defined by "The 4 Freedoms"

The right to:

• USE it for any purpose
• STUDY how the program works and understand it
• SHARE copies of the software
• IMPROVE the program and distribute these changes

So what?

Benefits for long-term preservation?

How long is "long term"?

• 10 years?
• 100 years?
• longer?
• or: 3-5 years?
  = market-lifetime of software

Virtual Immortality?

• Archive your replayer
• Including schematics
• Building components
• Exchange it with others
• Make it work under future condititions

Why isn't it more widely used or known in archival domains?

Perceived professionalism and quality

• Price = quality?
• GUI = quality?
• Professionals not using it?
• Ongoing support?
• Responsibilities?

Price = Quality?

• You can get buggy software under all licenses: proprietary and free.
• And within any price-range ;)

Price = Quality?

Quality of software is price- and license-independent.

Professional vs. Free?

• BBC:
  • Dirac: http://diracvideo.org/
  • Ingex: http://ingex.sourceforge.net/
  • and many more:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/projects/
• GlusterFS: Used for Hollywood movies
• Open EXR: Developed and used by "Industrial Light & Magic"
• And GNU/Linux (which also powers the Internet) of course ;)

Independence?

The archival domain

• Relatively small market (niche)
• Off-the-shelf products often focus on different use cases
• Highly specialized demands
• High potential for vendor dependence...

With Free Software

• Reusability of existing solutions
• Free choice of (local) support/suppliers
• No black-box
• Common tools/codebase = larger userbase
• Less "forced" upgrades

The next step:

Professionalization of Free Software

Paying for Free Software:

The best of both worlds

Paying for Free Software

Benefits:

• Better support/updates
• Pooling resources
• Improvements available "upstream"
• Designed for your use-cases
• Overall better cost-effectiveness
• Public money = public solutions

Professionalizing Free Software:

How?

• Make support contracts
• Paid installation/integration
• Hire developers
• Non-financial contributions:
  • Documentation
  • Testing / bug-reports
  • Helping others

Professionalizing Free Software:

Whom to ask?

• Open Preservation Foundation
• Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
• Maintainer of FOSS-project of your interest
• Companies that support/develop Free Software

Professionalizing Free Software:

A real-world example

The lossless video codec FFV1

How it all began...

• Austrian National Archive (Mediathek) wanted to do lossless digital video archiving
• Not satisfied with existing products (Interoperability issues)
• Found FFV1 in FFmpeg
• Excellent codec, but we wanted/needed more...

How we used the "4 freedoms"...

• Contacted and hired FFV1 maintainer Michael Niedermayer
• Other parties involved (pooled resources)
• Budget calculated in reference to costs of proprietary alternatives
• Had FFV1 improvements in progress...

How it continued...

• FFmpeg forked: LibAV
• Patches then submitted to LibAV, too
• FFV1.3: faster and integrity-aware
• Important: Published our experiences with FFV1
• So: Other archives using FFV1 now profit from improvements, too!

PREFORMA's role

• Upcoming conformance/policy checker
• Standardization of FFV1/MKV
• Increased credibility of these formats
• Reduced skepsis of users/vendors
• Encouraging similar projects in the future

A growing Free Software ecosystem

for long-term preservation

Collaboration welcome

We archives have:

• Common interests.
• Common challenges.
• Common solutions?

- Fin -

About myself

License and Credits

This presentation is available under a Free License:

Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike"
(CC-BY-SA)

Peter Bubestinger-Steindl
(p.bubestinger@das-werkstatt.com)