There are lots of airplanes flying around that are older than 8 years. Trains are build to last 40 or more years (and they do).

What I can't believe is that people upgrade for the sake of upgrading. There's an old saying "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". New versions of software *do* break things, whether intentionally or not. And I have to say, many open source authors don't consider backwards compatibility as important as they should (if they'd paid more attention to it, it would help in getting corperations to use more open source software). Perl tries it best to be backwards compatible, but it isn't perfect.

Not everyone seems to realize the costs upgrading takes. Upgrading a single developer box isn't hard. But for numerous organizations, installing new, or upgrading existing software is a big deal. Banks, hospitals are air flight controllers don't just upgrade. They have long and rigorous testing procedures, including regression tests. Anything that breaks is a show-stopper until resolved. People working with the new or upgraded software may need re-training. This all costs money.

I think the computing world would benefit if eight year old software wasn't "obsolete" and would just run without problems.