I think that GNU Guix is extremely well-suited to improve this situation.
Also, one could think this is an academic problem, in the sense of am otherwise unimportant niche problem. It really isn't, it is just like in many other topics that academics get confronted first with this issue. I am sure that in many medium or large companies there are some Visual Basic or Excel code bases which are important but could turn out extremely hard to reproduce. This issue will only get more burning with today's fast-moving ecosystems where backward-compatibility is more a moral ideal than an enforced requirement.
It is well known that ransomware can wipe-out businesses if critical business data is lost. But more and more businesses and organizations also have critical, and non-standard, software.
I think that GNU Guix is extremely well-suited to improve this situation.
Also, one could think this is an academic problem, in the sense of am otherwise unimportant niche problem. It really isn't, it is just like in many other topics that academics get confronted first with this issue. I am sure that in many medium or large companies there are some Visual Basic or Excel code bases which are important but could turn out extremely hard to reproduce. This issue will only get more burning with today's fast-moving ecosystems where backward-compatibility is more a moral ideal than an enforced requirement.
It is well known that ransomware can wipe-out businesses if critical business data is lost. But more and more businesses and organizations also have critical, and non-standard, software.