I worked for a company doing this stuff, and I was always asking why didn’t they do the jump to Linux. The answer was that they already have something that they could adapt from previous versions which was already certified. So a sunken-cost phallacy.
Two years ago, the same developer was working on an even older system with BASIC… Which I guess they already retired.
The Sunk-cost fallacy is when you weight the value of something disproportionately because of effort or expense you've put into it.
But if you've got an OS that's certified for the work you're doing, and it's not costing you extra to work on that OS, then there's no fallacy - you're getting more value out of the cost of certification you've incurred, and shifting to some other OS would presumably require you to incur the expense of certification again.
That said, the skills needed to work with a legacy OS will tend to become rarer, so you ought to factor that into your calculations.
I'm guessing that in this example, it was more expensive to switch to Linux and recertify. I doubt anyone in management was really arguing against a cheaper option because of money spent 10 years ago.
And than you bet on the wrong ditro. I do support work for a commercial Linux Desktop program. We went from SuSE, to CentOS, to Scientific Linux, to Ubuntu. Lets hop Ubuntu stays. :-) Our "luck" is every five years or so we exchange the machines.
Getting it over is not the difficult part. Discovering and managing all the bugs, quirks and features of a distro, desktop environment and access software (NX, X2Go, RDP, VcXsrv) is what robs one will to live.
They used 30 years the same Windows version. So maybe they can use 30 years the same Linux version. I don't know. All I know is, choosing Linux is the opposite of choosing stability.
> Choosing Linux is the opposite of choosing stability.
I would argue that a close-source (at least before the leak), non-supported kernel is way more unstable and risky than an open-source, still maintained one (some kernels are actively maintained through 2033).
Bear in mind that the position was not about developing/maintaining the OS, but the applications that run on it.
How do you measure the lack of support/resources for an operating system that is EOL? I don’t think there are that many Windows 3.1 developers out there… Linux in exchange is a bit broader.
You compare it to the cost of developing and certifying a new safety critical system. I recommend the recent talk from the team that investigated the Polish train corruption scandal. It goes into the hardware and software on these older train systems. They're essentially using them as PLC controllers, not as networked general purpose machines.
Hold on, the criticality of the system they were developing was not that high, in the end they could use Linux, which to my understanding is not certified for any ASIL D application.
That with the scandal sounds interesting, so you have any pointers where I can get a good sum-up? :)
Two years ago, the same developer was working on an even older system with BASIC… Which I guess they already retired.