3 ms·

How dare the customer have opinions of there own and vote with there feet and money for it! This is outrageous! Dont they want to go Hipster-Hyper-Heaven?

deathanatos 9y ago
I'm not saying the customer shouldn't be able to vote with their feet/wallet, but they should also be aware that code rots, and security vulnerabilities become more known as time goes on. I don't think criticizing an organization for sticking with ever older, ever more insecure software is necessarily wrong. What makes this harder is that people bought into a platform that doesn't given them access to the code they run. The business that originally created it isn't interested in supporting it further (well, they are, i.e., "Windows 10", but I presume that that's not acceptable to our hypothetical "vote with there [sic] feet" person), and I don't really see that the business should be forced to support it, either. (It's not like MS didn't support it for quite a while, and don't still offer a solution.) Software evolves. Ideally we're finding more secure and better ways of doing stuff, and shedding the old stuff, though I acknowledge the debatability of that. I acknowledge that it's also unfortunate that UI changes, and bloat, often seem tightly coupled with that. But if people also persist in choosing non-free, non-open source software…
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Really, the reason "code rots" is because of updates. Compatibility with old code breaks over time. That is, in fact, exactly why so many government systems use ancient Windows XP versions and the like: Code doesn't rot if you don't update anything. Of course, security vulnerabilities do still become more known over time, and if you patch for them, you end up rotting code. To handle both code rot and security vulnerabilities, you need software that is persistently maintained and upgraded, which means having a software team permanently on the job instead of what a lot of government software came from: One-time projects where a contractor comes in and does something.

deathanatos 9y ago

I'm not saying the customer shouldn't be able to vote with their feet/wallet, but they should also be aware that code rots, and security vulnerabilities become more known as time goes on. I don't think criticizing an organization for sticking with ever older, ever more insecure software is necessarily wrong. What makes this harder is that people bought into a platform that doesn't given them access to the code they run. The business that originally created it isn't interested in supporting it further (well, they are, i.e., "Windows 10", but I presume that that's not acceptable to our hypothetical "vote with there [sic] feet" person), and I don't really see that the business should be forced to support it, either. (It's not like MS didn't support it for quite a while, and don't still offer a solution.) Software evolves. Ideally we're finding more secure and better ways of doing stuff, and shedding the old stuff, though I acknowledge the debatability of that. I acknowledge that it's also unfortunate that UI changes, and bloat, often seem tightly coupled with that. But if people also persist in choosing non-free, non-open source software…

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Really, the reason "code rots" is because of updates. Compatibility with old code breaks over time. That is, in fact, exactly why so many government systems use ancient Windows XP versions and the like: Code doesn't rot if you don't update anything. Of course, security vulnerabilities do still become more known over time, and if you patch for them, you end up rotting code. To handle both code rot and security vulnerabilities, you need software that is persistently maintained and upgraded, which means having a software team permanently on the job instead of what a lot of government software came from: One-time projects where a contractor comes in and does something.