The Red Queen Problem |
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27 November 2023
Perusing Slashdot this morning as I often do, I came across news that PHP 8.0 end of life is today. Little do they know that I'm still running a PHP 5 application that I built in 2015. If it ain't broke. don't fix it, right? That is decidedly not the mentality of the software industry. Newer is always better. Automatic updates are everywhere in the software we use. The apps on my phone are updating themselves nearly every day. Everytime I restart my browser it upgrades itself. Operating systems not only on my phone and laptop, but also on other hardware I own are ask to update themselves. If you own a Telsa they even send software updates to your car to change the way it drives.
This all sounds nice, but there is a dark side to giving up this control. Companies that sell hardware want you to buy new hardware so "upgrades" often degrade performance. The US Government would like to use the tracking software in your car to follow you remotely and Congress recently passed a bill that is a first step toward using software to control your car against your will. Don't bother trying to read the whole bill - it's enormous in scope although short for Congress at only just over a hundred pages. Most of the stories about it say "don't worry, it's not a kill switch for law enforcement", it just mandates that cars sold in the US after 2026 analyze your driving to guess if you're drunk and shut down if it thinks you are. Putin's opponents have a habit of dying in plane crashes and falling off buildings - imagine if he could control Russians cars as well. And China's social credit system shuts dissidents out of the economy with control over people's bank accounts and credit systems. Certainly they'll be shutting off people's cars too soon, but it couldn't happen in the US or western Europe, right?
On the side of those who build the software, there is something similar. Large software companies have thousands of engineers who can afford the time to make every little change and improvement possible to their software to improve their profits. Small companies cannot. Yet most software has hundreds of dependencies, libraries written by other people their code uses to function. This is usually open source software, meaning anyone can update and change the code as well as use it without paying the creators any licensing fees. It was a great idea that freed developers to build things faster, but today many of the developers working the most used open source software libraries are funded by the largest software corporations. By creating a constant stream of dependency updates and backward incompatible changes these libraries create drag on product development. Software is now deceptively easy to create and increasingly expensive to maintain. At least PHP is open about the companies actually in control of PHP. The same is true for Python. To wit, I attended a dinner put on by Facebook to actract potential hires several years ago. It was a small event at a Python conference and Guido van Rossum, the creater of Python, was there for us to chat with. Following the money I shouldn't have been suprised since Facebook and Google are two of the biggest supporters of the people developing the Python language. Cui bono?
