On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 11:52 PM, Mark H. Wood <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 09:04:09PM -0700, Manfred Moser wrote:
> > On Wed, September 12, 2012 6:06 pm, Chris Graham wrote:
> > > On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Anders Hammar <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I fully agree with you and I'm actually of the opinion that the Java
> > >> community has a responsibility to provide enough reasons for those on
> > >> older Java platforms to upgrade. But as long as we provide libraries
> > >>
> > >
> > > Simple.
> > >
> > > Two reasons actually.
> > >
> > > Without going off on an essay about the psychology of developers and
> being
> > > obsessed with "shiny new things" (and a Dev centric view of the
> world)...
> > >
> > > 1. Cost.
> > >
> > > 2. Especially in the corporate world, they are far more concerned with
> > > function rather than form (ie the underlying technology). In short, if
> it
> > > works, leave it. Which also relates to #1.
> > >
> > > Case in point: My current project is a multi million dollar one that is
> > > *finally* moving from 5-7 YO tech to the newest stack. Partly due to
> the
> > > support issues, but mostly due to the cost of support of the older
> > > versions; it's finally become cheaper to upgrade than to continue
> paying
> > > the huge support costs.
> > >
> > > But my basic point is, that the act of upgrading large systems is not a
> > > cheap one, so it is NOT done lightly.
> >
> > I think that the cost is only so high because companies keep waiting
> until
> > it is too painful. If you constantly keep upgrading a bit here and there
> > and stay up to date with your operating systems, runtime environments,
> > browsers and client site frameworks and so on you would actually be able
> > to save a LOT of money in the long run. But you would have to constantly
> > invest rather than waiting with no investment until things fall apart and
> > then being forced to large costly upgrades.
>
> I think this happens because the money you spend on upgrading and the
> money you save because of it are in two different pots.  If you look
> at the way budgeting works, you might find that the current behavior
> makes sense -- assuming that you accept that the way budgeting works,
> makes sense. :-/
>

Absolutely true!

Especially when support is outsourced (even internally) an you have
on-shore/off-shore teams.

Thanks for reminding me of that.

-Chris

> So it is mostly short sighted management and an absence of real technology
> > leadership in organizations causing this problem imho. And forcing the
> > pain to stay on old stuff higher (like Oracle is doing with deprecating
> > Java 6 earlier) is actually a good thing.
> >
> > imho Maven 2 should have long been deprecated and removed from the
> > downloads pages..
>
> Tell the distro.s.  Gentoo still has Maven 3 keyworded on all arches,
> and Gentoo is one of the bleeding-edge, daily-updating distro.s.  I'll
> be using M3 for production work the day after they take the ~amd64
> keyword off it.
>
> --
> Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   [email protected]
> Asking whether markets are efficient is like asking whether people are
> smart.
>

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