[squarefoot]

In my not very long but significant experience, it often boils down to having no intention to allocate time/resources for optimization (just convince the customer their hardware is obsolete, and possibly be the one who scores a sale of new hardware) and contracts with other parties that force developers to keep old software modules/libraries in place.

Been there done that; there was this 3rd party software module "Y" that exchanged data packets over the network between "X" and "Z", supposedly doing complex operations, and my company was developing both X and Z. I was in the Z developers team. We had all protocols documentation, so although I didn't have the sources of that Y module, I could see that it was just passing around packets without performing any functions that couldn't be easily integrated in either X or Z, I mean really 2 hours of work in a government project that lasted years, so I asked about the opportunity to some colleagues who confirmed that getting rid of that module was a no-no because by contract we were forced to partner with that company, therefore we had to keep their module that essentially did nothing but passing packets (and money). I recall my immediate thought was "software bureaucracy", which probably boosted even further my decision to run only Open Source software wherever I can.