Many years ago, I wrote a program called vCardSplit.

It does exactly what it says on the tin...  It splits vCards.

Yesterday someone sent me an email with a bug report in it.

Which is the first in over five years.  Not bad going, I guess.  But still, a bug's a bug and I should fix it, right?

Except this requires me to install all the development tools I used to write it.  No huge deal, but firing up a VM session, cloning it, dropping the installers on it, running the installers, restoring my backups of my source code archives - it'll take an hour or two to get all that done.

And that's before I even look at the bug!

Thankfully, not only was the bug report clear and unambiguous, but it was also followed up by another email letting me know that it was false.  Phew!  Close call!

Still, this is a problem when writing software.  My last release of vCardSplit was five years ago.  But people are still downloading and using it.  A simple 33Kb program that runs in a console window, it's still the only free tool that does what it does all these years later!

The lesson here is that software can have a very long life, and that if software you write is a burden then the burden will live for a long time.

Luckily, nothing I've ever written has ever been burdeonsome for me.

Still, I did once write a password generator -  in VB!  And I don't think I have the source code for that, much less a copy of VB to support it with!  I really must take that down later this week, as I don't believe I can support it effectively any more.  Granted, it's had no complaints for seven years - but still, better safe than sorry!

For a few years now I've been meaning to write some software for Lotus Notes.  But I must admit that the burden of support is one of the things that puts me off.  I need one of those mythical "quiet periods" during which I can polish up code to a point where its support burden is low enough that I'm confident it can be unleashed upon the public.

When I do, I'll put it all up on OpenNTF. There's been some discussion on their change to an Apache licence, but that makes no difference to me.

However, it's always a matter of time.  So I wouldn't hold your breath...

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