Does it need to be active? It's done and it works.
It's not written in an highly unstable language. The safety of every bridge you drive over was probably partially validated using fortran numerical code from the 1980s.
Point being: a project needs updates to remain useful in contemporary contexts. code that happily built -Wall, pedantic, error... in April 2002 may fail miserably in today's tool chain.
plus it may not benefit from contemporary advances in silicon architecture, etc.
said fortran code happily gets minor and major updates