Story time: at my previous job we had an old server called "the black box" which hosted some old cronjobs and various services from about a decade earlier. Ther

Story time: at my previous job we had an old server called "the black box" which hosted some old cronjobs and various services from about a decade earlier. There was no documentation and everyone who had worked on it had left years earlier. The ops team dutifully kept it online but otherwise didn't touch it, and no other team owned it. In short, it was the ideal candidate for your "reverse Chestertons fence" strategy. At some point we had to delve into what was actually on it, and it turned out that both company payroll and a service responsible for about 50% of company revenue was on that box. Simply removing it to see what happened would have easily cost a few million in revenue, even if it could be reinstated from backup a day later (and I'm doubtful if we could have restored it at all without serious data loss). Now obviously having such a server is a bad practice in the first case, but if you find yourself in such a position "just kill it and see what happens" is definitely not the most economical option in all cases. In the case of POSIX it might hold, since probably the worst case is that some volunteers throw away a few years of their life hacking away on yet another OS that will never gain traction. Humanity spends a lot more time on a lot less worthy endeavors.