If you think of Software as an Ivory Tower, you lost the Supply Chain in the Projection

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The practice of comparing software to an Ivory Tower has highlighted high-risk and critical dependencies which could bring the whole product/service down in case any unavailability, especially those "neglected" dependencies which are mostly static or buried deep in the very low layers of the stack. Unavailability could happen out of the sudden for example when a maintainer quits or a license changes.

Despite all the benefits, especially bringing preparedness regarding risky dependencies, the Ivory Tower picture could itself negatively create an illusion of safety. To explore this, let's look at the Ivory Tower picture as a "projection" of the Supply Chain of the software. If we imagine the software's supply chain as a 3D directional network, the Ivory Tower picture would be a 2D projection of that network where all the vertices are collapsed.

In the age of Continuous activities, such as integration, delivery, and hardware (such as firmware changes and also hardware-related changes obstructed by the infrastructure as a service), the software would frequently go through its supply chains. Therefore, to go beyond the false illusion of safety related to the Ivory Tower practice, it is required to generalize that practice to the supply chain level.

The good news is that in contrast to supply chains of tangible goods, software supply chains have the benefit working with intangibles. Such flexibility would bring the possibility to redesign a software's supply chain in order to make those not-so-frequently-changing vertices and nodes moved to a sub-supply chain that is dormant most of the time except for special events.

Moving to the next level, the next question would be: What is it that its projection would be the supply chain itself?

Just a thought.

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