Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability Workshop

It is important in considering sustainability to ask what needs to be sustained.
Specifically, is it software products, or the capabilities enabled by that software? In this
position paper, we argue that sustaining capabilities and architecting to enable change are
often the better choice, particularly when one considers the costs and consequences of
maintaining a specific software product. Further, these approaches are not independent –
software products architected to support change are themselves more maintainable. We explore
the idea of sustaining capabilities in more detail, discuss its application to scientific
cyberinfrastructure, and conclude with a discussion of how this reframes the discussion
of sustainability and leads to different approaches to achieving long-term sustainability of
scientific cyberinfrastructure.