{{{ "Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession."
- -- W. H. Auden }}}
{{{ "You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries."
- -- Garrett Fort }}}
"End of Life" is obviously a euphamism for murder. It's the underfunded process a vendor goes thru when it finally decides to stop paying for the labor that is currently supporting some legacy software (or hardware) who's revenue stream doesn't compensate sufficently for the cost of labor.
Note that labor cost's aren't the issue, it's return on labor costs. So while the labor might cost 2 hundred K per year any given company may demand two or four or ten times that in return on that cost of labor.
Vendors will sometimes decide to kick a dying product over into the open source community. Why? Reasons vary.
They may want to avoid negative PR with the users. They may want to rain on somebody else's parade. They may want to have a nice story to tell the in house developers - who's baby they are killing. I've also observed cases of what might be called "respect for a work of art" as the motive.
It is rare that the lawyer's will let this hand off to open source happen - since they are totally fixated on retaining control over IP - without extremely senior AirCover.
In somecase, though I can't think of any, the buyers of the dying product can drag it into OpenSource out of desperate need.
Some companies might want to breath new life into a product that wasn't a MarketSuccess. A good example of this is the MozillaBrowser. While the principals are composed of Netscape employees, the transparency of the source was a powerful tool to regain MarketShare. If it weren't for the MozillaBrowser going OpenSource then we'd ALL be using IE right now.
-AndrewCOliver
"... a powerful tool to regain MarketShare." - Mindshare yes, MarketShare not yet.