> Eventually, the software is going to stop working on my SOE. Which means more and more boxes are going to be running non-standard deployments in my environment (or it costs me to update). Every maintenance window, infrastructure upgrade, disaster recovery exercise (and event), has to take those servers into account.
If you're fussy about nonstandard servers on your infrastructure, go get a handful of basic servers from hetzner or amazon. Completely silo them. No access from them to your 'real' servers, and don't include them in maintenance windows or disaster recovery. The person who is paid to spend a few hours per week keeping the server mostly-up will use part of their time on basic updates and backups, and nobody needs to worry if something occasionally breaks.
> Perhaps I pay licenses for those servers to run - OS, support, databases, backup, whatever. Maybe I have a contract with an SI to run all this as a managed service and this costs.
If you have license/contracting costs, you should have pre-allocated money for that when you released the product. If it sold to expectations, a later decision to discontinue the line shouldn't be a problem.
> There's opportunity cost in terms of resources for keeping all these legacy products on as well - both infrastructure and resource related.
There should be no infrastructure impact, and the equipment/employee cost should have been part of the initial product scope, not treated as an externality that can be trimmed at will.
> And that's just the technology related part of it. There's business and accounting impacts as well.
Like what, having to process a quarterly bill for the servers?
Let me put it this way: While the costs are real, they were expected, and can be made pretty low. They should be able to run or outsource a basic legacy server without any hurting. I bet if there was a contract saying they had to refund $2 to every customer for every month the servers were down, they could get plenty of offers to take over hosting for half that price.