It's a bit technical, but I'll try to give a brief explanation of the issue (and it apparently relates to far more than this particular problem).
Tech has evolved a lot in the past few decades, but there is still a lot of legacy code. That is, code that was written back in the day, and that you think would have been superceded by some of that new technology, but for whatever reason (generally associated with the costs of making the change, plus a, desire not to disrupt critical processes now that most of bugs have been worked out, etc) it isn't.
xkcd has a tongue-in-cheek comic on it.
This is a rather well known issue, I think. It's also somewhat related to the concept of technical debt, because companies will often take the quicker solution of just layering new tech over the old rather than taking on all the challenges of redoing everything.
Anyways, the other interesting piece to this discussion is that this widely used and super important code is part of the open source movement. That is, nobody is really being payed to maintain it. Any improvements and fixes are pretty much done by volunteers.
There's a lot of great discussions on the importance of open source software, and I've only touched the surface of it so I don't think I can really do it justice.
It is... Complex. For profit companies like Microsoft and Google actually do use open source resources, so they aren't always strictly opposed to each other. Ummm, and quite a number of businesses use open source software for their application servers. (I, for example, was given a company laptop that runs windows. But I use it to connect to our various servers that are almost all running some version of Linux or Unix).
Anyways, the infrastructure bill and the debate over what counts as infrastructure (which makes my position in our infrastructure team somewhat amusing) got me thinking about this a bit.
Like, some people argue that broadband internet should count as infrastructure, or as a utility. (Given the benefits of making it easier to use the internet - for people and businesses - and it's growing necessity for modern life I think there's a compelling argument there. Or at least room to encourage private businesses like the way we encouraged telephone companies to provide access to rural areas).
But, is it just about running the fiber cables and routing traffic? Are we just talking about the infrastructure that an internet service provider offers? (and don't we have some national interest in making sure that's secure, and resilient in the face of whatever sorts of disasters might come our way?)
Or should we also consider the protocols we use to access the web.
Not saying yes or no for sure, there'd be a lot of tough questions about the role of government, private industry, and more. Just something to start thinking about.
Adding the original Twitter link, the discussion is a little broader here.
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