On Jan 2, 2008 12:20 PM, fredistic <
fredistic@...> wrote:
> Breaking backward compatibility is a luxury that only open-source
> developers can afford.
Backwards compatibility is frequently very expensive. Microsoft in
particular expends vast amounts of resources on backwards
compatibility, and quite a bit of that effort is almost entirely
useless to the vast majority of their customers.
Would you rather have those engineers working on new/improved
functionality, or on bug-for-bug compatibility that's only interesting
to a tiny minority of users?
Think of backwards compatibility as a tax that older users impose on
newer users. That may be worth paying; newer users may themselves
want backwards compatibility in the future.
But the community may also decide that tax isn't worth paying. Older
users may be required to spend resources to use newer versions of the
system in question. That's OK; they're getting the benefits of
development resources applied to the newer versions too.
> If you need to maintain your customer base (like, for
> example, Microsoft does) then you do anything to avoid breaking
> backward compatibility.
Not at all. Older users just have to spend some resources making sure
they're good on the newer system. It's one of those
engineering/business decisions that people make every day.
--
James Moore |
james@...
Ruby and Ruby on Rails consulting
blog.restphone.com
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