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Comment by tyho | Hacker News Reader

How likely are these companies to upgrade to the latest vim though? It is not like these companies running VMS are following the latest version, if vim dropped crufty old OS's, then the code would be simpler and the old OS's would not notice.

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There are a lot of companies with VMS environments that _must_ be regularly updated/patched/maintained with various security bits for SOX compliance or the like. There certainly are places with static installs that are carefully guarded, but that doesn't mean there isn't a poor admin/dev/user who appreciates an updated or patched version. Heck, he might be the guy doing the porting in his spare time to make his day job better. Often if your seeing regular updates to continue support for an obscure system, its a good bet someone using that environment is the key contributor for their own sanity.

This does raise the question though: when is it appropriate to drop old platform support for any OSS project, and how do you even measure it? User surveys seems insufficient.

When I change jobs, I check which version of my editor the dev environments have installed. If it's too old, I build a local copy of the latest version of my editor. No worries asking IT or Ops to update a package for me.

When it comes to production servers, I'm more likely to build my editor in my home directory than use my sudo privileges to install my editor in the system.

So developers can be building newest versions of code on old systems. I do.

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