Commercial Software
Computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes, including previous editions and versions of software that are not available or no longer in use. This entry broadly includes proprietary software, access through licences or subscription business models.
Examples
Wordstar, Novell Netware 386, SAP, Oracle, Adobe Photoshop; Microsoft products, such as the Windows Operating System and MS Office, are some of the most well-known examples of commercial software.
Hazards
Lack of skills, commitment or policy from corporate owners; lack of established frameworks and tools; technology is poorly understood; no emulation pathway; reliance of proprietary software and/or subscription-based business models; limited or no commercial interest; complexities of sector-specific software or data types; lack of technical documentation; uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works; technical protection measures that inhibit preservation actions; encryption.
SoftwareMitigations
Effective replication; access to source code; emulation pathway; strong technical documentation; preservation pathway; licensing that enables preservation; use of open formats and open source software; corporate preservation capability; awareness and advocacy work with commercial software providers.
Bit List History
Added to list: 2023Last Review
2023 Review
This was a new Bit List entry added in 2023 to draw attention to the particular challenges of content and software preservation for commercial software products. The entry focuses on the distinct risks relating to the availability and access to software and code, and lack of preservation interest or mandate, by companies that publish them, creating challenges to preserve digital content and software in source code form. The entry also highlighted that software, as a whole, was not currently on the list (compared to higher-level category like Apps). The Council agreed on the creation of a new higher-level Software digital category group to address this gap and challenges specific to software preservation while also recognizing overlaps with other entries including Apps, Gaming, Media Art and Research Outputs. While there are overlaps, the Council agreed it would be valuable to separate software to reflect differences in the volume of access to software, significance and motivations for preserving commercial software in and across different sectors.
2024 Interim Review
These risks remain on the same basis as before, with no significant trend towards even greater or reduced risk (‘No change’ to trend).
Additional Information
A large part of this requires advocacy work, and call to action to raise awareness with commercial software providers to preserve their software.
Software preservation raises (often debated) questions about key characteristics for preservation. Wordstar, for example, may be of interest for not only access to the content it facilitates but also for the preservation of the software as mass produced, commercial product. You can also argue in more practical ways that for most files there is usually something about them that you need for the original software for or else the content will be different, and therefore preservation of software is critical regardless of the significance of the software as a product.
Software dependencies on the environment (hardware and software) enable it to run and its associated context and support and in this way some of the approaches can overlap with gaming, but software is not seen as a creative product in the same way. This nomination is more about commercial uses and industrial design objects where games are artworks for entertainment and social/cultural uses.
One might argue the contents of the Museum of Brands and Packaging is not unique and yet it seems unsafe to expect it to necessarily exist elsewhere. The low regard in which commercial software (and this is before we consider bespoke research software) is held - except as a means of accessing more interesting material - seems to suggest that we may in the future look in vain for someone with a copy of even quite widely available software, let alone, say, early UK antivirus products, world leading as they were.
Case Studies & Examples
- The example of the Microsoft outage in July 2024, in which a software update led to the cancellation of flights, healthcare disruptions and payroll issues. See Global IT outage: More than 5,000 flights cancelled; how security 'arms race' led to crash | As it happened, Sky News (2024), [accessed at 2024-09-06].
- The Digital Archiving at the University of York blog series about preserving Wordstar files, which notes and demonstrates how a random copy of WordStar in the archive was able to be used to get a sense of the files in their original context. See Some observations on digital appraisal, Mitcham, J. (2018), Digital Archiving at the University of York [accessed at 2023-10-24].