I've been thinking and reading a lot about sustainable open source recently, and one thing that keeps coming up is users expecting long-term support (multiple-years on end) for open source. The argument almost always involving the cost of staying up to date, and it being too high.

To me that's like saying you own a car and refusing to do any maintenance on it for years on end, because "the costs are too high"; and then expecting others to cover for you when it finally breaks down.

The irony is that postponing updates for long periods of time has a backfiring effect: software keeps evolving, and the gap between projects and up-to-date dependencies only grows larger, so the task to update only grows more difficult.

The cost of staying up to date is not optional.