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As ever under such circumstances, I went through my list of email and Twitter contacts, seeing this as a good opportunity to offer some exposure to indie developers whose work I've enjoyed over the years. One response came back very quickly, albeit from a name I didn't quite recognise. The message was in fact from a developer's wife; the person I was trying to get in touch with had died the previous week.
The developer in question was Stewart Hogarth, who'd lost his battle with congenital heart disease; he was just 34. We'd only been in touch a few times, but I'd been captivated a couple of years ago by his truly excellent 8-bit tribute I Am Level for iOS and Android. This was a smart, charming, entertaining title that married eye-searing Spectrum-style graphics, old-school single-screen platforming challenges, and modern mobile tilt-based controls. It was still installed on all of my devices, and it was strange and very sad to think that the person who created it was no longer with us.
Another developer I was interviewing at the time expressed his shock regarding Stew's passing, and also concern that his work's availability was now potentially on borrowed time.
As a developer, he said it was almost like a little of his soul somehow went into each app or game he made; through what you've created, you can in some way live on if you're no longer around. This of course isn't new thinking — people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums[sic] have the kind of longevity that just isn't afforded to modern digital apps.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday October 21 2015, @04:53PM
Quite who would bother to list their websites, source code, etc. in their wills with some kind of "Give this to the community" clauses? Who would have an executor capable of understanding how to do that?
It's rather like this giant box of physical photographs I have from my mother, some of them certainly over 100 years old. I'm sure that some individual photos are amazing and important, but to me - they're just fuzzy black-and-white pics of people I don't know. It would take a lot of research to identify the people and places, if it's even possible.
Only - that's a few hundred photos. I expect most of us techie types have hundreds of thousands - maybe millions of files. On various devices, in various cloud services, encrypted, on web servers, you get the idea. Among those millions are a few that might actually be worth saving. Just how could anyone other than the creator even know where to look?
I'm not sure there is any solution, but this is a problem that is only going to get worse. It's much worse than that box of photos: those will still be in my closet in 20 years, but digital data? If you don't save it, it will disappear in a few years at most. Well, all of it except that embarrassing pic that is now on a demotivators poster.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.