[choeger]

Maintenance also has a second aspect: Bitrot.

Because we get so much of our tools essentially for free now (languages, operating systems, browsers, mobile clients) we have to accept that we don't control the pace of their development and deprecation. So maintenance must permanently adjust to an existing, moving ecosystem.

The thing is, I have never met a manager that budgeted this fromt he get go. But I also never met a manager that did not understand the sentence: "We won't be able to ship/develop after day X because big OSS project Y deprecated our version" (think CentOS repository deletion).

It is our job to keep an eye on this and report it in the terms management understands: "We use Y for free so we have no leverage and Y stops working on day X, stopping all our activities."

[samhw]

This is a really excellent constructive way of framing it. Thanks for posting this!