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It’s OSS software not a SaaS. If people use it there will be no deprecation date. You can just fork and continue.

• dgellow 7y ago
  I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but that’s at best a naive view. In practice you cannot just fork the codebase and continue maintaining it, that has a high cost that a lot of organization cannot afford. It’s technically true that you can fork the project but in practice forking something that big doesn’t really happen without a big player leading the fork (or some motivated people with enough time and money to dedicate to the fork, which is possible but unlikely).
  • javagram 7y ago
    Hence the “if people use it” qualifier. Companies relying on Bazel would step in and support it. We’ve seen this play out plenty of times before, e.g. Hudson to Jenkins or OpenOffice to LibreOffice, where a popular OSS product loses a corporate sponsor and continues.
    • dgellow 7y ago
      You’re ignoring all those times where that didn’t actually happen. It seems quite risky for an organization to rely on the idea “you can just fork and continue the development yourself in case of issues”. That’s not what happens in practice, taking over the development of something like bazel has a non-negligeable cost. Now for sure you can find some (cherry-picked IMHO) success stories but that’s the exception as far as I can tell.
• skybrian 7y ago
  Bazel is too complex to make this practical for most people. It would be like forking Go. However, it's unlikely to be abandoned.