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Is software ever done?
(opensourcesecurity.io)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Programming
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Yeah me too! I think they didn’t go far enough here, because, as you note, there’s still a huge community around speedrunning and playing Super Mario Brothers. There’s a sense in which the thread of a piece of software is not ended until the last user shuts it down for the last time, but there’s no way to know when that is.
Also if software is Open Source plays a lot here. Anything that is Open Source is never done software. And then what if the community decompiles into source code? Super Mario 64 was done game I suppose, then fans decompiled and wrote the source code for the game and keep working to improve or add functionality. Now its undone?
The term "done" is so vague, it makes no sense to talk about it without declaring what it is. It's like using a variable in a duck typed language and just change its meaning randomly when its needed... (yeah Python byte me on this in the past... sorry I still have the wound).