[FollowSteph3]

This is NOT true of all proprietary software. It's just that with apple either you keep upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time or you will have problems.

Apple has its pros and cons, and one of those is that you have to keep upgrading regularly.

Most proprietary software will offer upgrade paths from older versions.

[stefanu]

You are right, it is not true of all proprietary software. There is no problem with software upgrades, not even with frequent software upgrades. Problem is when the software requires regular document upgrades. This requirement can not be met in real life, if you produce few documents a month.

[FollowSteph3]

What I'm saying is most proprietary software does offer document upgrades. You can open very old versions of Word, Excel, etc. My company supports opening backed up files up to about 8-9 years ago. The only reason we don't go further is that older versions don't work on modern OS'es and hence no one uses them. But even then it's still possible to upgrade if you really wanted to.

[mikeash]

Additionally, there's nothing inherent about open source that avoids this sort of problem. An open source project could decide on exactly the same sort of upgrade path, where they support current-minus-one versions and that's it.

In theory, open source is better because the old code is still out there and you can get it up and running to upgrade your data. In practice, it can be pretty tough to get open source code that hasn't been maintained in years to build and run properly on a current OS install.

[yuhong]

I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format for example.

[ccozan]

Yes, but you can download and install at minimal cost any old version of Libre/Openoffice and read your Staroffice documents. You are not quite left stranded. And also I assume the code to read that format still resides in a repository, cann be pulled and reused at will. Not the same happens with proprietary software.

[davidgerard]

And even Apache OpenOffice abandoned them. Basically the old binfilter was that horrible.

[laurent123456]

It's relatively easy to install an old version of XP or Debian on VirtualBox to run the old software though, and that would be enough to export the documents to a newer format. In comparison, OSX is generally hard to get running on VirtualBox.

[rakoo]

The problem is that with proprietary software you have to trust the editor that everything will go well. That's an important choice you have to make, and doing it lightly can bite you hard in the face later.

With Libre software (rather than OSS), you the user stay in charge. It may require rolling up your sleeves (things have changed, and you can now easily find companies that will provide support in Libre software), but in the end you keep control.