[gue5t]

Software "with no upgrade path" that hasn't been proven correct relative to a formal specification and deployed in an appropriate context (sufficient conditions to consider it a "not software" black box) should be considered a mistake and the responsible parties should be held accountable for reparations. Complacency with its continued existence is unsustainable.

Obviously this is an idealistic "should", but we need to take every available step to move towards this stance because a policy of limiting the networked universe based on the worst common denominator client results in an inescapable black hole of technical debt.

Open-source software plays into this model beautifully because it makes it much easier to propagate improvements across the entire space of systems. There remain some problems such as langauge interoperability ("best implementation of protocol X is in language Y but our system is written in Z and the Y-Z interop story is bad") which I'd like to see people give more attention. We need to address the quadratic workload of porting/binding every library to every language.