Comment by TuringTest
3 years ago
> They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
So, you've never had a commercial proprietary library your core product depends upon, being obsoleted and ceased support, without a license nor access to the code to keep maintaining it in-house? Because it happens, and I have.
And it's not just because the library was commercially inefficient, but because it got bought by a competing large corporation, who wanted to replace it in the market with their own solution, and wouldn't bother to support the library for its old users.
When this happens, at least the open source license allows you to keep supporting your use case by yourself, instead of being forced into the new solution being pushed by the vendor.
So the library got replaced with a new version? Happens in open source and often with less notice than with commerical products. And the idea of supporting the use case by yourself gets shot down. Also, you'll find money talks in these scenarios and you can pay for more support it just costs so much no one wants to do it.
> So the library got replaced with a new version?
No, the new library promoted by the vendor was utterly incompatible with our system, being based on totally different assumptions. So the library got replaced by an open-source library that did the same as the original and had a permissive license, which allowed my company to build a wrapper around it at an affordable cost.