> So this works in theory until there is a really bad bug in some part of the code base and there is no one who knows how to fix it.
10 years of production usage tends to have hammered out all the "really bad bugs." Sure it's possible that something goes wrong, but it's also extremely unlikely that it does unless something in it changes. Which, if you freeze it & silo it off, doesn't really happen.
A huge amount of software not made in silicon valley operates exactly like this. It just sits there, running for decades, doing its thing.
Re:Google Kills Cloud Print
by julianozen on Friday November 22, 2019 @06:55PM
(#21611350)
I don't know. I'd bet anything that has been production for 10 years with no feature added means anybody who knows anything about it left ages ago.
Its a cloud service that was started pre-Google Cloud. There is no way that it can sit in perpetuity and not be worried about old versions of Java, old OS, HTTPS bugs, large deprecation plans
Still, the risk and maintenance/ownership burden is there.
Yes, of course, but the point is it's a very, very small cost. It's basically zero for a company with Google's resources. Meanwhile killing it is actually costly. Not to engineering, but to PR and reputation.
Microsoft still patched products so old they had lost the source code by editing the binary itself!
Re:Google Kills Cloud Print
by elijahwright on Saturday November 23, 2019 @12:35PM
(#21615269)
I've done this before. It's really fun!
If they’re not going to keep a team dedicated to keeping it alive, then you get into a situation where an emergency fix needs to be deployed or it needs to be abruptly cancelled
It’s possible this already happened once or twice which is why they had to sunset it