Large European Companies view of long term support (Score 1)

Not that I am recommending it but the Europeans under the Polarsys project are trying to solve the long term support problem for large projects. Ericsson with their communictation system and Airbus with their aircraft have found that they need active support for at least 20 where new features are added to systems. Then system maintenance is needed for another 15 years. I have worked on a number of Ericsson projects that have a developement system based on Solaris using IBM tools that are no longer maintained. Development is still going on and will continue for another 5 to 10 years. Ericsson and Airbus have now embraced an open source model for tools so that if the original vendor stops support, they could develop or contract out for support.