Software Free

Archiving has become a huge deal for organizations large and small as rules and regulations dictate how easily information needs to be available for compliance and legal purposes. So it's no surprise that enterprise content management vendors are incorporating these requirements into their solution offerings.

Oracle, being no exception, has developed the Oracle Online Archive that uses their database as a storage repository for all types of content, including email, files, etc. Seems like they have been down this road before though. Does a "single solution for all content types" work in the real world?

A little while back I gave Peter Murray-Rust a hard time for daring to suggest that OOXML might be acceptable for archiving purposes.

Here's his response to that lambasting:

My point is that - at present - we have few alternatives. Authors use Word or LaTeX. We can try to change them - and Peter Sefton (and we) are trying to do this with the ICE system. But realistically we aren’t going to change them any time soon.

My point was that if the authors deposit Word we can do something with it which we cannot do anything with PDF. It may be horrible, but it’s less horrible than PDF. And it exists.

There has recently been a discussion about GNU switching from bzip2 to lzma for their distributed tarballs. They still offer gzip tarballs as an alternative. However, Gentoo has been preferring the bzip2 tarballs mostly due to the improved pack ratio of bzip2. Unfortunately, the software for lzma is not (yet) as mature as some would like.