This is totally me just being naive, I don’t work in the software realm but do have an interest possibly one day, but if we have stuff that’s been able to run (seemingly) successfully for years, or maybe even decade, what maintenance needs to even be done on old programs? Is this simply for people discovering security vulnerabilities and patching them? Is there more to it than that?
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Let’s talk about software that doesn’t need to be or can’t be “maintained”. Think of a NES console with a game cartridge. That NES console and game cartridge still work even though they were never “maintained”. It’s because the console never changed, and the game cartridge never changed.
The NES console/game is kind of like a time capsule, the system is never changing. No updates, no game expansions, nothing.
With modern software the device and things running on that device are changing regularly. Two systems might need to talk to each other over the internet, or some software depends on a specific aspect of the operating system. There are 1000’s of these communicating systems and dependencies, and in modern times each one of these systems can be updated. So unlike the NES console/game example, this collective group of systems is constantly changing.
Now if one of those things makes a breaking change, you have to “maintain” it to continue for it to work like before.
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