> One thing I really like about software is that it can theoretically live forever... ...The learning you do goes to waste, when some fickle company pulls the p

> One thing I really like about software is that it can theoretically live forever... ...The learning you do goes to waste, when some fickle company pulls the plug in the future. I think you could say that software lasts forever when it's author wants it to. There is plenty of dead proprietary software that dates from before the era of cloud services; it's dead because, just like the SaaS company that pulls the plug today, nobody thought (or dared) to preserve the source code. To make sure software really lasts, history shows us that the best thing one can do is to release the code as FOSS :)