Everywhere I've worked (from places with a handful of VM startups to 20k machine enterprise) it's also a cop out to completely abandon care and feeding of syste

Everywhere I've worked (from places with a handful of VM startups to 20k machine enterprise) it's also a cop out to completely abandon care and feeding of systems. I call it Long Term Suck, and I've yet to see a place where it has not caused long term harm to an organization big or small. If you aren't equipped to deal with gradual shift in API of dependencies, you shouldn't be doing whatever you're doing or the code has a half life and should be trashed after the employees that understand it have moved on. What _is_ important is ABI stability of the kernel, because it lets you figure out how to deal or not deal with Long Term Suck on your own terms and lets proprietary software vendors figure out independently how they want to do deal with it. Both Linux and FreeBSD kernels do this pretty well.