Hi, All the arguments mentioned by others in this thread, especially the "why upgrade if it's working" one, are raised frequently by companies and developers. It's a matter of resource constraints, as is everything else in life ;) Even you abide by the assumption that the latest stable version is the best, and everyone should upgrade, you cannot assume upgrading is a zero-cost task, and therefore you cannot assume there will ever be sufficient motivation to do it. That's a basic management argument, and it's not specific to Tomcat by any means.
Naturally, I've heard the argument many times. Since you also can't assume any app is bug free, eventually bugs tend to show up. Now the developers have to re-learn the old version of the product, setup up a dev environment for the old version of the app, patch, re-test, and re-deploy. This is frequently (in fact, research suggests nearly always) must more costly than simply keeping up with upgrades. Then the company hires consultants to help them fix, and you'd be surprised how many people make a nice living off of these type of consulting assignments (any Tandy consultants on this list? ;). This has been the paradigm since at least the late 70's, and appears to only be getting worse (again from research -- anyone on the list who reads the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management is fed up with this research). But most developers are too busy to worry about that scenario, and it goes back to the resource-constraint argument: if we as a company can spend time on creating this new app to address an existing need, or upgrading the server for a completely fine working app, that's a no-brainer for management. For government, military, and externally regulated industries the scenario is even worse because there's a length change management and audit process in place typically. I could go on and on ;) This is well-trodden territory, the subject of much discussion in various offline forums I belong to. Yoav Shapira Millennium Research Informatics >-----Original Message----- >From: POLO ARAUJO, JAVIER [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 2:19 AM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: Why tomcat 4 or even 3? > >What is more, a lot of app's for big companies are just forgotten or >have a few users, so why spend time upgrading to a newer version of >tomcat? > > > >Paul said: > >> Sometimes one dont need to be faster. > >> I'm talking about a old legacy app (not critical - intranet), running > >> very well for a couple of years in the same old server. > > > >Javier Polo. This e-mail, including any attachments, is a confidential business communication, and may contain information that is confidential, proprietary and/or privileged. This e-mail is intended only for the individual(s) to whom it is addressed, and may not be saved, copied, printed, disclosed or used by anyone else. If you are not the(an) intended recipient, please immediately delete this e-mail from your computer system and notify the sender. Thank you. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
