Closed source causes gear to die early
I am using a Garmin running watch, meanwhile seven years old. I had to replace the battery once but otherwise it just works. But recently, Apple decided to remove the serial driver code for this running watch from Mac OS High Sierra and hence I am not able to read out data anymore. Luckily, someone wrote a Linux command line utility some time ago to read out the data from Garmin watches (the tool is currently broken on newer versions of Ubuntu but people seem to be working on fixing this). This story is another example demonstrating that it is only open source tools that you can rely on longterm. This is where open source really shines: as long as a program is doing something useful for some people, someone will step up and maintain and fix it or even improve it. Commercial software simply gets unusable due to business decisions. And many people in the software industry do not care about long term data archives - except those companies that like to get your data in order to turn data into valuable assets of their own. I will now extract all my GPS running date from various programs I have used over time into a common format, say good bye to closed source running applications, and contribute some patches to open source programs.