[rrwo]

Why are you in a worse position?

That depends on the changes to the library since, and how and where the library is used.

Suppose I regularly generate a CSV file, all ASCII, where all the rows are integers or fixed precision numbers. I have a ten year old CSV library that processes that file, and has worked without any problem for ten years.

I have no interest in updating the library. Updates can introduce downtime, but provide no improvement. In fact, they introduce a slight performance hit because of new features and that I don't need. There is also the risk that the updates will introduce bugs, and then I'll have to spend time diagnosing the bug, and coming up with a fix.

Now let me reverse this: suppose there are two libraries to do the same task, A and B. They don't have the same features, but for your use case, they are both easy to use and do exactly what you need.

A was first released in the 1980s and was last updated five years ago. It's still maintained and is available in most Linux distributions.

B was first released three years ago and has had 20 updates since, 18 of which included fixes for security issues that don't affect A. (The website for A is regularly updated to indicate that it has been tested and these issues do not affect t.)

Are you better off using A or B?

[growse]

> Why are you in a worse position?

Because, in general, as you drift behind, the friction of upgrading will increase.

You might not need to update today, but you're not in control of external events that may force your hand (sudden critical security vulns).

> Are you better off using A or B?

In this contrived example, it depends.