It occurs to me that a program like this can be effectively complete. And stand alone. I'm sure there's a few bugs and of course always more features are possible. But this software would probably be usable as-is in 100 years for Torah study just as it is today. It's quite a shame we still haven't come up with a way of packaging software in a way that makes it relatively future proof, even if the legal issues could be resolved.
We kind of have. Buy a new mac today and you can run a 40 year old sh program fine. Its just that most people aren't being trained on these standard unchanging technologies in computing unless they take an active interest in it. They are being trained on $newapp and how to navigate $newwebsite and become beholden to those patterns of software design sensibilities, because in this attention economy this obviously generates a lot more money than having the masses use some simple bash code to solve a lot of their problems.
It only seems ridiculous framed from the modern perspective on computing. Ask this in 1995 and yes, this would be the best interface. The only reason why its no good anymore is because these abstraction layers we shovel into people. Maybe in 2005 the best way to view the talmud was a gui based native app, because thats the level of abstraction layer people where shoveled versus the command line. Maybe in 2015 the best way moved from a native app to a website, since thats now how most people operate by then, not installing tools themselves but just going to different websites and therefore losing that knowledge. Maybe today the best way is a mobile app, because people don't even visit desktop websites anymore and don't take well to those design philosophies.
You have to wonder where this is marching off too, this march away from complexity into easier and simpler abstractions, further from the magic and raising the ivory tower of the wizard who makes these tools higher above the masses who increasingly have no idea what is happening nor any mental model to think about this stuff as it actually works. Certainly some groups benefit from siloing the knowledge of fire of our modern world, but I can't help but imagine we are all losing in this race away from complexity.
If it worked on people's Windows 7 computers, then people can probably still use it in 100 years (potential issues with network services required by the software aside). I can run a Windows 7 VM today, and given that I can also run an emulator for any marginally popular 40 year old game console I expect people in 100 years will have an x64 emulator that can run Windows 7. Not the most convinient thing, but lots of people enjoy games that way, so why not study the Torah that way
