Mark Pilgrim is going off about how he’s moving away from the Mac OSX and onto Ubuntu because he’s unhappy with the amount of work involved in data preservation. Tim Bray is also discussing this.
That’s all well and good, but this isn’t remotely related to the Mac itself. It is a universal problem.
I did a lot of song writing in the ’80s and have a lot of original music as sequences that were built using an Ensoniq ESQ-1 keyboard/sequencer and dumped as MIDI sysex data to a Mirage sampler and saved on floppy disk.
I still have the Mirage (although its getting more and more “quirky”) and the ESQ-1 and I’m “converting” the data by actually loading it into my old synth stack and “playing” it while having Digital Performer “record” the data stream in slaved sync mode.
This is the original source material. I used to have versions of this material in Studio Vision format. However, while I was off exploring the world and had my stuff mothballed, Gibson bought Studio Vision and promptly killed it. Macs moved to Mac OS X from MacOS, and Studio Vision is copy protected (like all music production software apart from Garage Band). So the Studio Vision versions were lost.
The Digital Performer file formats are proprietary too. If you want to maintain total data fidelity, you have to archive the program, the OS, and the original machine. Otherwise, its all lossy conversions again. Switching to Ubuntu won’t mitigate this.