This is actually kind of hilarious. In addition to the Unix examples here, this reminds me of my wife finding a 30 year-old Nintendo system complete with some old cartridges and an old controller. They were in a box since she was in college. Plugged it in and it still worked.
Cloud-based services inevitably die, sure, but this is not true of software or machines in general. There's an entire YouTube genre of people finding and restoring cars that were built 30-90 years ago and abandoned for decades and getting them to run. We just don't build things to last any more, but a lot of that is by design. Subscriptions and planned obsolescence lead to more revenue.
Atlassian could have built software that doesn't rot. Step 1 is don't get rid of the individual server licenses so people can self-host. Step 2 is probably don't use Java because eventually users will have to upgrade to a JVM that isn't compatible to avoid security problems. 64-bit ELF will probably work fine for another 60 years. Step 3 is open source it so users can build it themselves since you'll eventually hit binary incompatibility problems otherwise. Do all of that and there is no reason Jira couldn't be as durable as sed and grep.
> Step 2 is probably don't use Java because eventually users will have to upgrade to a JVM that isn't compatible to avoid security problems. 64-bit ELF will probably work fine for another 60 years.
[Citation needed]
I trust the managed language more in this regard. I don't know specifically the situation on the BSD side, but on Linux userland, once it uses anything that is not the Kernel or glibc, it's anyone's guess if the ELF will even run if not on the exact same packages on the same machine that compiled it.
Cloud-based services inevitably die, sure, but this is not true of software or machines in general. There's an entire YouTube genre of people finding and restoring cars that were built 30-90 years ago and abandoned for decades and getting them to run. We just don't build things to last any more, but a lot of that is by design. Subscriptions and planned obsolescence lead to more revenue.
Atlassian could have built software that doesn't rot. Step 1 is don't get rid of the individual server licenses so people can self-host. Step 2 is probably don't use Java because eventually users will have to upgrade to a JVM that isn't compatible to avoid security problems. 64-bit ELF will probably work fine for another 60 years. Step 3 is open source it so users can build it themselves since you'll eventually hit binary incompatibility problems otherwise. Do all of that and there is no reason Jira couldn't be as durable as sed and grep.