Then you've just crippled the ability to deliver new functionality at a rapid pace without huge associated support costs.
no?
Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new functionality at a rapid pace", especially to feature-complete products. This whole "keep flapping your wings or you'll die" thing is a lie. It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop. It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
Some do, agile startups tend not to.
> Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new functionality at a rapid pace"
And your proposed legislation would ensure that they cannot.
> It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop. It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
It's not fine for this to be the law.
Besides, this would reduce e-waste from perfectly functional devices that are not longer functional because the cloud endpoint went away. So it would be good for the environment too.
You genuinely can’t see how this might stifle creativity and add costs in a small, fast moving company? I can already hear the jaded developer conversations -
“Oh god, no don’t change that, we’ll be stuck with another ‘version 3 ‘ we have to support forever”.
And the managerial equivalent - “delivering X new feature will break existing APIs and as a result of the regulations we have to keep those running, adding time to the dev cycle for back/forward porting and increasing support costs, maybe hosting costs too, best shelve it”
It’s fine for slow-moving enterprise stuff, for everyone else it’s a crazy imposition. You can’t drop a feature you don’t want to support any more, you can’t completely change how one works, you’re constrained.
Of course it’s possible to work that way, but it adds load. In the context of “Europe doesn’t have enough fast moving home-grown tech”, legislating that would be precisely the wrong move.
This is the kind of insane regulation that holds Europe back - it’s the problem not the solution.
