[masukomi]

if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move forward.

Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.

[civilized]

I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier) and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for updates like more recent software. Millions of people have had a single 100% static binary for these programs running on their computer for many years. The ability to phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or disabled.

This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen often. The update would even have a well-known name like "Service Pack 2".

The idea that all software must be constantly maintained is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't share this assumption, and in fact on many products, updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other than perhaps critical security updates on products that are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.

[intelVISA]

Single static binary software, the blessed future we never saw.

[zer8k]

As beautiful as it is, and for the all the problems dynamic linking causes, the edges on single static binary software are very, very sharp.

[MichaelZuo]

I'm not sure what to say to this... you can just buy an old copy of Office 2003 on eBay, an old Windows XP computer, and boot it up and try it out?

You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.

[j1elo]

That kind of rethoric doesn't fly too far... Your original point was

> Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office 2003 on Windows XP machines??

I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using old software in modern versions of Windows. The maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations of Windows itself.

[MichaelZuo]

If you also include Windows 2000, Vista, and 7 computers that weren't updated in the last decade, I think that would be a sizeable fraction of all Office 2003 users in 2023.

Whether or not they make up the numerical majority of all extant users is simply irrelevant to the point of 'Plenty of people'. It's easily many, many, thousands.

[yread]

Sure you can do that. But look at the list of 60 vulnerabilities with score 9+ that you're exposing yourself to:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

So you can try it out but don't open any documents, or run it while connected to the net. You'd better also not insert any images. Have fun!

We could also have a post "World where bad people don't try to break your software"

[crickey]

You answered your own issues. Dont open untrusted documents from the net. not running while connected to the net seems mute as the software doesnt directly access the internet. Seems like issues even the most up to date software suffers from.

[bena]

Support for Office 2003 ended in 2014. Close to a decade ago. No maintenance, no patches, no service packs, nothing. No energy expended working on that codebase.

Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.

That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these facts or make it hard to find.

[j45]

Unlike recent versions of Office, old ones didn't call home, and Microsoft doesn't really have an idea of how many copies of their software are still in use in some cases.

[Lacerda69]

And?

I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades. Just program it right once for god sakes.

[nemo]

>I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades

Your assumption that a word processor is a simple program is something you might want to consider, at a low level handling text rendering in a word processor is highly complex work. Besides text encodings regularly evolving and changing over the years especially in the pre-UTF-8 world (but even with Unicode), there's also the reality that security threats evolve over time, and once threats are discovered old code that once seemed fine becomes insecure and dangerous. In computing the reality is that there's constant change driven by supporting a regularly changing computing environment, security fixes, bug fixes, increased computing power permitting new features that are then implemented and new ideas appearing, et al. Software will always be changing, that's the way things are, there's good reasons for this. Trying to oppose that reality with an unrealistic model that doesn't account for the causes of change just leaves you misunderstanding the way the industry works.

[adamc]

You vastly underestimate the complexity involved. Also, new attacks get discovered that were not even dreamed 20 years ago. There is no "just get it right" when right is measured by what we know, and that keeps changing.