Comment by sshine

> Mozilla does this. So does Google. And Apple. And Microsoft.

Those are all companies you need to be wary with, because a strategic choice on their behalf may upend your life with a few days warning, or none at all.

And the sad part is that Mozilla joined their ranks, not qualifying as a truly “public service company”.

> All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline

Sure, we must all perish one day. But what you describe is how commercial SaaSS gets pruned because it’s good for business, and I have two objections with that:

  1. That doesn’t make it good for users.
  2. It’s a different timeline for software than for services.

My Linux toolchain doesn’t suddenly deprecate some core tool. Only commercial software services die like this; FOSS bit rots at the worst. And when some authority makes a brainfart, people fork.

I was contacted today by the customer of an old employer post bankruptcy. They want to know how to deal with self-hosting the service their hardware depends on; this never got delivered. All software is temporary, I told him, meanwhile his very expensive hardware wouldn’t initialize properly on boot.