(this article is not just for embedded developers)
A few months back I was reading Doug Schmidt’s blog, on The Growing Importance of Sustaining Software for the DoD, and he made the claim
“although software does not wear out, firmware and hardware become obsolete, thereby requiring software modifications”.
It was a bit of a clarifying moment for me. Doug clarified two terms that I suppose were obvious, or maybe not. Software is this thing that can have a long useful life, where firmware is going to be regularly be made obsolete as hardware evolves.
I’d like to add to Doug’s statement:
although software does not wear out, it can be destroyed from within by unmanaged dependencies on firmware and hardware.
Think of all the code denied the potential long life of software due to being infected with dependencies on hardware.
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