Ian Murray wrote:
Part of my professional work is risk assessing system upgrades. I have been doing so long now that everything I professionally do is considered from a risk perspective. Maybe those of us that have to assess risk on a daily basis understand what I am on about and the ones that don't.... don't.
Exactly. I once built things on AT&T Unix and hardware. Nice big company with plenty of resources, dedicated, bright developers, a history of following through many releases, and then out of the blue it was gone. Dell was the next choice since it was pretty much the same code base as AT&T SysVr4 with some extra drivers. Then when Windows95 came out, Dell dropped it and pretended they'd never heard of unix. (I understood much later after reading their transcripts in the Microsoft antitrust case...) Then there was Red Hat which didn't really work at the time but had the redeeming features that bugs you reported sometimes got fixed and you didn't have to count licenses - and then that went away too. So yes, I'm paranoid. There aren't many survivors in this business. Hmmm, I left out an interesting interlude with BSDI in there somewhere but they were killed by a lawsuit.