Comment by tpmoney
2 years ago
I think this is somewhat unfair. Software doesn’t “require” maintenance anymore than anything else does. If you’re happy with the state of the world as it exists at the moment in time you create the software, it will continue to run that way for as long as you have working hardware to run it on. A compiled application on a computer with a frozen set of software is just as permanent as any academic paper.
The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates, and that requires changes which in turn creates maintenance.
Software maintenance is less comparable to a single academic paper than it is to the entire field of academia. Sure Freud's papers are all exactly as they were when he published, but if you want to be in the field of psychology you’re going to have a bad time if that’s the most recent version of your academic “software stack”
From what I've read on HN, software certainly requires maintenance if you're hoping that others will buy or use what you've developed. That's the comparison I'm trying to make.
> The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates
I agree, from what I can tell. Personally I'd prefer that software UI not change nearly as often as it does, but I concede that I'm apparently in the minority.
Perhaps if the software is more isolated? Many good points here, and I absolutely can avoid a lot of maintenance by my choice of languages and libraries, BUT just being online (or even on-network) forces quite a bit of maintenance.
I'm generally writing web apps, requiring me to keep up with a stream of security updates just to stay online: browsers deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1 [1], browsers require TLS certificates to be renewed ~annually, languages only fix security vulnerabilities for the last few releases, etc. Even linux kernels are getting shorter support going forward. [3]
[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/237688/when-wil...
[2] https://www.digicert.com/faq/public-trust-and-certificates/h...
[3] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-kernel-reduction-...
I feel like all of this falls under "people don't want stuff to stay the same". Being online at all is a commitment to being in an ever changing environment, especially with respect to security and encryption. Fixing security vulnerabilities is declining to accept software as it is. Likewise, kernel support only matters if you're upgrading the hardware. To use an extreme example, you can (provided the hardware itself is still working) take a C64 from the 80's, plug it into the wall and use it as if it were 1984 all day long. Everything will work just fine. You might not be able to connect to any BBS anymore, but that isn't because the software required changes or maintenance to keep working, but because society itself changed and no one offers a C64 compatible dial-up BBS. To bring it to a physical analogy again, your 1950's encyclopedia set won't have anything to say about the internet or cellular technology, but that's not because your encyclopedia doesn't work any more, it's because the world around it has changed.