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by senderista 893 days ago
How many businesses have the in-house expertise to maintain a defunct codebase? And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?
2 comments

When we took over the codebase, it was 50-50 whether or not we'd really continue with it long term or just fix a couple important bugs and work on porting to something new. Then we managed to hire a couple of the core devs from the product and decided to keep it.

We were lucky that they did a good job with the escrowed code and had everything we needed to build the software on day one.

>And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?

That's impossible to answer -- depends on how hard it would be to port to another product to fill the need (assuming you can find such a product), or write a new system from scratch to do what that product does.

This is a story about successful CYA, not a recommendation to go balls deep on any hawt sAas that comes your way.

But also, a lot of companies have engineers that can.. Engineer. Often it's more an availability issue than expertise.