Maybe we should coin a new term for this, like we have a term for "technical debt".
In technical debt:
- Companies save money by not investing enough into maintaining their systems.
- The technical debt doesn't show up on a balance sheet, therefore everything looks okay to the management.
- But eventually the debt comes due and you have to upgrade and that costs time/money. The more you "saved", the more you have to pay for the upgrade.
Here the debt is not necessarily technical (you could be running the latest version), but one step further detached:
- Companies "save" money by not supporting the people who maintain their open source components.
- This doesn't show up on a balance sheet, so everything looks okay to the management.
- But eventually the maintainers lose interest or refuse to do free work for big tech companies without payment/support or have other things to do or whatever. And then you have to pay for a solution like
- having someone else (inside your org) maintaining the solution, or
- migrating to a different software
- or you just keep running poorly maintained or unmaintained software, at which time this debt converts into (normal) technical debt.
I don't have a good name for this type of debt, yet. Maybe "indirect technical debt"? "Open Source debt"? "Maintainer drain debt"? Any ideas?