On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Merlin Moncure
<mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
The only reasonable answer for this (a provably used, non-security,
non-standards violating, non-gross functionality breakage case) is
*zero*. Our historically cavalier attitude towards compatibility
breakage has been an immense disservice to our users and encourages
very bad upgrade habits and is, IMNSHO, embarrassing.
The flip side of this is that the ability to make improvements freely is one of the biggest strengths of free software over commercial software. Oracle and Microsoft invest *tons* of money in maintaining huge libraries of backward compatibility code and drastically limits their ability to keep making improvements.
