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Software rot

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 8 min read
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Summary (TL;DR)
Software rot is the gradual degradation of software due to environmental changes, incompatibility bugs, and unused code. Causes include CPU clock speed changes breaking games, lost passwords making systems unrecoverable (onceability), deprecation of encryption standards (TLS 1.0/1.1), and discontinued online services. Active rot occurs in modified programs; dormant rot affects unused software. Forked codebases face security patch conflicts and documentation loss. Refactoring and avoiding entropy via Brooks's law help mitigate rot.