“Scientific research is dependent on maintaining and advancing a wide variety of software. However, software development, production, and maintenance are people-intensive; software lifetimes are long compared to hardware; and the value of software is often underappreciated. Because software is not a one-time effort, it must be sustained, meaning that it must be continually updated to work in environments that are changing and to solve changing problems. Software that is not maintained will either simply stop working, or will stop being useful.”…
The goal is to encourage software developers, whatever the type of software they are developing, to do the extra work needed to make their own software sustainable and to build or join communities whose members work together on shared code. The task is how to achieve this.
