Abstract
While end of life sounds final and certain, it’s actually often a phased process, and even concrete dates are dates after which something can happen rather than dates on which something happens with certainty. This article will try and give a feel for end of life so that you can plan around it when an end of life date is announced for software you are using. Wikipedia gives the following definition for end of life: “End-of-life” (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor’s point of view), and a vendor stops marketing, selling, or rework sustaining it. (The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product.)” Wikipedia, End-of-life (product), available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-life_(product) (last visited May 21, 2019) The key point in this definition is that the software doesn’t magically disappear. Instead, the software doesn’t get updates, and changes in the world around the software eventually make it difficult to run, cause security issues such that running the software is a bad idea, or bring the world to a point where the output of the software is no longer useful.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 17-19 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| Journal | Technical Services Law Librarian (TSLL) |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| State | Published - Jun 2019 |
DC Disciplines
- Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Library and Information Science