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@lispi314@udongein.xyz @chris__martin@functional.cafe @dalias@hachyderm.io Free and open source software by its very definition encourages people to make frequent changes to every part of the system, world-breaking changes that are otherwise unthinkble elsewhere are welcomed on a daily basis, and the community members in general are proud that they're so innovative (e.g. one can port an entire OS to a new CPU within a year). The consequence of this system is that most software projects are not a product, there's no such a thing called "the software", but a human process: reporting issues, creating breakages, writing patches, doing CI/CD, packaging for distro, that are in constant motion. If the motion stops, the software will stop working very soon.

If you look at a Win32 app, it's exactly the opposite - it's a product, not a process, once it's completed it's "set in stone", and some people will still use the same binary 20 years later, sometimes they spend great effort to keep the mysterious binary running, even when very little is known about it. The later "minimum maintenance" approach is historically rarely used by the free software community. Perhaps some projects should try it seriously.