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Liabilities are debts. > liability: a thing for which someone is responsible, especially a debt or financial obligation. According to the balance sheet equati

Liabilities are debts. > liability: a thing for which someone is responsible, especially a debt or financial obligation. According to the balance sheet equation, > Assets = Liabilities + Owners Equity Certainly all code is a liability - it must be at least understood and maintained from time to time (80% of lifetime cost is in the maintenance). And while an accountant might also mark it an asset - not all code is an asset - and we recognize that fact when we delete for badness or disuse - or rewrite it to make extending and maintaining it easier.

Jedd 7y ago
As intimated, I'm not sure that the fuzzy language and world of economics is the best way to view such things, however ... I'd accept that debts are a subset of liabilities, but not that 'liabilities are debts'. A debt implies an externality, while a liability implies some generic exposure -- it's that which I focus on when considering (all) code as a risk to an organisation. I suspect, however, that we agree on the fundamentals. There's some cost and risk to developing and trying to maintain any code base, and accepting that can usefully inform development and operations work better than thinking of code as a (near-)risk-free asset.