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.
They gave a few examples of things that require maintenance (like a house), but that doesn’t really cleanly apply to software. They also gave examples like books that can be considered “complete”. Software is more like the latter, it can absolutely be finished after it completes what it set out to do.