[jimmyl02]

This is great perspective about how assumptions play out over longer period of time. I think that this risk is much greater for free third party services for critical infrastructure.

Someone has to foot the bill somewhere and if there isn't a source of income then the project is bound to be unsupported eventually.

[tekacs]

I think I would struggle to say that free services die at a higher rate consistently…

So many paid offerings, whether from startups or even from large companies, have been sunset over time, often with frustratingly short migration periods.

If anything, I feel like I can think of more paid services that have given their users short migration periods than free ones.

[cortesoft]

Nah, businesses go under all the time, whether their services are paid or not.

[lqstuart]

Counterexample: the Linux kernel

[charcircuit]

How? Big tech foots the bill.

[shlomo_z]

But goo.gl is also big tech...

[0x1ceb00da]

Google wasn't making money off of goo.gl

[johannes1234321]

But what did it cost them? Especially in read only mode

Sure, an service more to monitor, while for the most part "fix by restart" is a good enough approach. And then once in a while have an intern switching to latest backend choice.

[iainmerrick]

Linux isn't a service (in the SaaS sense).