30 year recreation timeframe? Sorry, but open-source gives you a way better chance at that than closed-source. There is no way your company could afford to pay Microsoft to dredge up the Win95 code in 2025. Or IBM for OS/2 or AIX or OS/400 or... Or Sun for Solaris/SunOS. Or HP for HP-UX. Or ... Open source? You absolutely must take the snapshot of the code you're using, and if it doesn't work with your RedHat Linux version 34, you at least have a reasonably-priced chance at getting it to work - hire a contractor at $100-200K/year (in today's dollars), and s/he should have it working in 1-6 months.

Oh, but the data format has changed 15 times since you took that backup? With open-source, you have the original code, and the current code, and that contractor has a reasonable chance of being able to map constructs from one to the other, and building a migration tool.

That said, 30 years seems like an awfully long time. I'm not sure whether your management has decided on this time frame because it sounds good, or because there's some actual practical or legal reason to do so. Even most financial audits don't go back more than 7 years... and 30 years from now, no one will even know what to look for that we may be doing today. All the documentation will be long lost, buried somewhere in backups that no one knows how to find anyway. Heck, I have a hard time figuring out what happened 10 years ago in my project (I joined this company/project 8 years ago), and it's still all online.

In reply to Re: Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by Tanktalus
in thread Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by samizdat

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.