People who actually use Debian and similar distros will disagree. In their view there’s nothing wrong with shipping older, patched versions of open sourced software. The license says they can do it!
So they grossly understate the problem, make it seem like it’s the person authoring the software at fault or the one who’s being unreasonable.
They’re quick to tell you how great the maintainers are, how much effort they put in for free but they don’t share that same love for the author of the package. You know, the person who actually wrote the software. They don’t acknowledge that without the author they’d have no software to begin with, and that providing support to older versions of software is a cost to the author. Not just older, but possibly broken in subtle ways because of the patches applied on top. The author still gets all the blame and all the support requests for changes they didn’t make.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to run old, stable software. No one questions that their distro is “the most stable”. That they cannot or will not see the costs of doing so on the author is a shortcoming, but there’s no solving that.
when it's your screensaver, and I can break into your computer using a bug that's been publicized, so every idiot with access to Google knows about it, yes there's something wrong with running old software. that's just my opinion though. btw, where's your office?
Yeah, but it's a problem for the person who wants to run old software. It's their choice, I support that choice. As long as it doesn't affect me, I'm fully supportive. Of course I'll be affected if my data is stored on such a server, but I'm assuming some level of competence here.
I personally run on latest, apply all updates zealously within a week or two.
I don't like leaving this decision up to either the maintainers or the author, TBH.
They have different goals/purposes, often, and they frequently don't line up with my own.
Maintainers are exhausting in their own right, they do a ton of work and so they think their decisions are more important because of the work they do, user be damned...
Authors usually only care about their version of the software.
I think, a better medium, would be if a third party is packaging an application, perhaps they should always explicitly state they are the ones packaging it. Then there is less confusion.
Or, you know, let the author keep control of that...
So they grossly understate the problem, make it seem like it’s the person authoring the software at fault or the one who’s being unreasonable.
They’re quick to tell you how great the maintainers are, how much effort they put in for free but they don’t share that same love for the author of the package. You know, the person who actually wrote the software. They don’t acknowledge that without the author they’d have no software to begin with, and that providing support to older versions of software is a cost to the author. Not just older, but possibly broken in subtle ways because of the patches applied on top. The author still gets all the blame and all the support requests for changes they didn’t make.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to run old, stable software. No one questions that their distro is “the most stable”. That they cannot or will not see the costs of doing so on the author is a shortcoming, but there’s no solving that.