Right, it doesn't die, it just becomes irrelevant when it meets
the needs of 10 years ago, but is far surpassed by current
offerings.  smail pops to mind as do several programs I can't
even recall that I lived by in 1990.

elm lives on only through stubborness of some people; though
I've converted several people with a muttrc that made mutt
look just like elm, but with MIME, POP and IMAP support
(and threading and color, etc, etc).

Several of you can look into the open source graveyard and
find familar bodies.

Irrelevance becomes a concern when, for example, I go into a new
job and offer, say, CVS as a way to deal with dysfunctional source
management habits.  CVS loses to proprietary commercial stuff when
the commercial tools work better.

I'm delighted that Netscape released CVS web and other management tools.

But while dead source code is still available, available != useful.

Quoting Greg A. Woods (woods@weird.com):
> [ On , December 14, 2002 at 01:22:28 (-0500), Perry E. Metzger wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: Any point to cvs using rsh? (was Re: Anoncvs pointer)
> >
> > There is an obvious reason for this -- all the brains in the old CVS
> > operation are now working on Subversion. So far, it looks like the
> > work has been quite worthwhile, but the side effect is that CVS is
> > dying, too.
> 
> You should not apply commercial software concepts to free software.
> 
> CVS is free software.  It cannot die so long as any copy of its source
> remains freely available.  Indeed it will thrive so long as even just
> one instance of it is used anywhere by anyone.  It will even grow so
> long as anyone bothers to read its source and maybe try to fix its bugs
> or enhance it in some way that one person finds useful.  That is what it
> means to be free software.
> 
> There is no such thing as "market share" for free software.
> 
> By your definition NetBSD would probably be dying too, but clearly it is
> thriving because I, for one, use it every day.
> 
> -- 
> 								Greg A. Woods
> 
> +1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>