[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 2, 2023, at 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> When you get to the commercial world, you'd be stunned to see how long
> old machines last.  If they are solving some problem, and they aren't
> broken, nobody replaces them.  I'll bet you anything there are still
> SCO registers out there, I'll bet there are still PDP-11s out there.
> 
> If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Well, sure, but this also comes down to at what point is losing some customers because they refuse to upgrade to something from this millenium worth the cost you would incur to be able to support their environment?

To be fair, stuff exactly like that was part of the bread-and-butter of Sine Nomine while I was there (for all I know, still is), and I kinda feel like that's the right answer: the places running old technology know they're doing so, and maybe they're doing so for good reasons.  But finding people willing and able to keep new stuff working on those machines and OSes does get more expensive over time.  So there's an aftermarket in consultancies that are willing to take over maintenance of things their vendors have abandoned.  No company concerned with its long-term survival *should* do that without, in parallel, pursuing an exit strategy towards something actually-maintainable at not-exponentially-increasing cost, but of course the inability to look beyond the next quarter is a fundamental flaw of financialization-driven capitalism.

And no one is saying you can't keep running your SCO cash registers forever on your own recognizance, but when they break, you get to keep both pieces, and if they break in such a way that suddenly your entire operation is being held hostage by some Russian organized crime cartel, well, you should have priced that risk appropriately.

Adam