I posted a graph on LinkedIn. It showed that of the 10 million open source projects tracked by ecosyste.ms, more than half haven’t been updated in two years. I didn’t suggest old was bad or good, but I got a number of replies about most of this software is “done” so it’s fine. We don’t have any evidence either way, I’m unwilling to make any claims about the numbers (yet, I’m working on it). This got me wondering what it would mean for software to be “done”. Which then led to the question is anything ever done? It’s a lot harder to figure this out than I had expected.
Also if software is Open Source plays a lot here. Anything that is Open Source is never done software. And then what if the community decompiles into source code? Super Mario 64 was done game I suppose, then fans decompiled and wrote the source code for the game and keep working to improve or add functionality. Now its undone?
The term “done” is so vague, it makes no sense to talk about it without declaring what it is. It’s like using a variable in a duck typed language and just change its meaning randomly when its needed… (yeah Python byte me on this in the past… sorry I still have the wound).