[_jal]

Worse that old network gear is technically incompetent business partners.

Speaking in very general terms, let's just say that we've had to maintain an extremely locked down machine running a version of sshd from about a decade ago hosted in its own DMZ, all for one particular partner. It is monitored for everything we can think of, and I still find myself stressing about possible ways someone could escape from that machine - I'm mostly surprised we haven't been attacked through them yet.

Their problem is they bought proprietary software that's no longer supported, and look at it as a one-time purchase rather than a forward commitment. Our problem is the nontechnical relationship is important and we can't cut them off.

[freedomben]

Indeed. I can't imagine what it's going to be like 10 years from now when the mountain of SaaS offerings start disappearing and there'se zero options to "run it a little longer"