In the world of software development, maintenance mode refers to a point in a program's life when it has reached all of its goals and is generally considered to be "complete" and bug-free. Continued development is deemed unnecessary or ill-advised, but occasional bug fixes and security patches are still issued, hence the term maintenance mode. Maintenance mode often transitions to abandonware.
Sometimes, when a popular free software project undergoes a major overhaul, the pre-overhaul version is kept active and put into maintenance mode because it will still be widely used in production for the foreseeable future. Project forks can also spawn from programs that go into maintenance mode too soon or have enough developer support for a more advanced version. A good example of this is the vi editor, which was in maintenance mode and forked into Vi IMproved. The Vim fork has many useful features that vi does not, such as syntax highlighting and the ability to have multiple open buffers.
Famous quotes containing the words maintenance and/or mode:
“War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)