Re: One thing people tend to forget about FOSS.
The point is that code can become dead if things outside of it break. Just saying "duplicate everything" doesn't necessarily change that fact since not everything exists to be duplicated. For example, I know what the CPU in this embedded thing was like, at least I know the specific type of ARM and the manufacturer. I have no clue what kind of networking chip they used but maybe I could find it somewhere, and if I could find it, I don't have one. You might, but in twenty years you probably would not. It's not critical to me that I emulate this successfully, so this isn't a big problem. I'm mostly planning to hack out some parts and rewrite the rest.
At some point, Windows won't be used anymore. You could still duplicate the hardware and run it just fine though. At that point, the code would have gone out of copyright and even if Microsoft died really fast and it hadn't expired yet, there'd be no Microsoft to defend it. I would still call it dead though, because it likely wouldn't run on modern hardware anymore. The same can apply to FOSS, and therefore I think it too can die. It might be less likely to die, but the world's full of code which doesn't work anymore unless you do a lot of work to nurse it back to life. That doesn't make me anti-FOSS. I prefer free software under almost all conditions. I do so because of the benefits it provides me and others today, not because I think it will have immortality.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
