[mraler]

I'm trying to think of a better analogy. At first I thought of stagnation, like how a river that gets blocked and can't flow gets filled up with algae and gunk.

But then what you said about software staying the same while the environment changes around it immediately made me think of evolution, Like any species that can't keep up with changes in it's environment, software that is not continuously updated to fit it's.

What do you think?

[TeMPOraL]

I think the term of art for this model is "Red Queen's race" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race.

IMO again, this apply only along the social dimension of software. I can still boot up my decade-old computer and use decade-old software to do useful work (hell, many if not most factories do that all the time). I can be screwed over if I go on-line - either by getting pwnd, or by letting the OS update itself - but as long as I stay away from the Internet, the machine will keep working, and so will the software.

(Then again, 'smilliken turned out to be talking about much larger timescales - not decades, but centuries. There, no software artifact will survive, only its mathematical essence.)