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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

They get updated after I conduct regression testing and release a new build of my software.

And you will never be slow in updating the software (or disappear) so it doesn’t matter you’re essentially creating a mini distro you have to keep updating forever! And also the user magically gets notified that there is a new version or it automatically updates the cd the user is running it from.

And the same goes for the other 20 apps the user uses of course, that all need things like an ssl library. They all have responsible maintainers that can be trusted to promptly regression test, build, package and release every update in the libraries the user doesn’t know they are using. You’d think it is impractical but actually it’s very easy. Apparently.

After my company "disappears" as you've suggested it's only a matter of time before said libraries, despite their best efforts, introduce application-breaking changes. Short of open-sourcing the whole thing (which actually is a possible contingency plan in the cards) all I'd be doing is foisting an unsolvable problem onto my users.

Even if I wasn't embedding DLL's into my binary it's not like users would be dropping in updated copies of them alongside my app.

I understand what you're getting at but it only works if you can outsource package management to competent distro maintainers (not a thing on Windows), and ultimately in my own experience as a user with decades of computing experience I've had a heck of a lot more problems from faulty updates than I ever have from vulnerabilities.

So instead of the application no longer starting, they get an application that starts fine but quietly allows them to get hacked and become part of a botnet and perpetuate ransomware.

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