Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oh_sigh 3146 days ago
What kind of companies sign 35 year support contracts?
5 comments

The kind that give away their product for free, give the company to their wife, develop an in-house distributed version control (fossil (which is excellent)), give that away for free and encourage other version control projects to please steal ideas from fossil. drh (Richard Hipp) is an interesting duck.
Presumably Hipp doesn't sign a 35 year support contract with his own company?
Ones that have effectively 100% test coverage on their codebases, massive existing deployments, famous levels of documentation, and world expert level comprehension of their problem space.
SQLite is used for small and embedded systems, which (if successful) can have very long lifetimes. If you were building something like an ATM for instance, you would be very sensible to sign a 35-year support contract for a crucial part of your system.
Have you seen an ATM? They're running Windows & SQL Server now. Microsoft isn't offering 35yr support contracts for Windows.

This is only partially sarcastic.

Imagine a company like Boeing then, which does have a 35 year shelf-life on their products.
Pretty soon we'll see aircraft running Kafka, microservices, elasticsearch, etc.

All running in kubernetes.

At least that way if the plane crashes you can just restart it.
Restart just the microservice that crashed!

  $ sudo service port-flaps restart
"That's not the sort of 'above the clouds' we had in mind"
My stack
Microsoft has nowhere near the quality, security and bug-fix track record, documentation coverage, nor testsuite coverage that SQLite offers. There's simply no way they can possibly provide such support.
There are products that Microsoft offers long support contracts for. To give an example, EOL for XP Embedded is in April 2019, which means XP in all its forms would've been supported for about 18 years.
I read somewhere the other day that sqlite is used somewhere in Airbus A380 passenger jets, and Airbus have a support contract for it.
SQLite was originally developed for missiles. Aircraft sound like a natural extension of that use case.
People who sell or support things with long lives where retrofitting is expensive or impossible.

Example: industrial equipment, military stuff, bridges, aircraft, etc.