The Foundation has made a three-year grant of ¥180 million to Frothly’s Lazarus programme to preserve and document the firmware of optical implants their makers no longer support.
Lazarus, Frothly’s digital preservation programme, recovers software and archives that would otherwise be lost to failing media, dead formats and shuttered companies. Under the grant it will hold the firmware, source code and service documentation of discontinued implants in escrow, so that qualified engineers can maintain the devices after their makers have gone. The first deposits will be the SEIRAN 2, from Kiroshi Opticals, and the Corvid, from the dissolved Raven Microcybernetics.
“When a company stops supporting an implant, the software inside it becomes an orphan, and so does the person wearing it,” said Yusuf Oduya, who leads Continuity. “Lazarus has spent thirty years bringing back software nobody else would. We could not think of a better home for it.”
Frothly accepts no funding with conditions on its findings, and the grant carries none.