Orphanware is software that was purchased and installed, but no
person in the company was assigned to or has taken responsibility for its operation and maintenance.
The end result is software which
may be running on critical production systems, but no one in the organization exists to provide critical updates, reconfigure features or options, resolve outages, or guide users who need assistance with
issues. Orphanware, or software which has been orphaned, is at risk of an unrecoverable catastrophic
failure.
Since Orphanware has been purchased and installed, but isn't actively managed or kept up-to-date, it is differentiated from Shelfware, which was purchased but
never installed; and Vaporware, which was never released in the first place.
All of our production software runs on Ubuntu and JBoss; after Bob, our only
Windows/.NET expert
left the company, all of our production
Microsoft systems are Orphanware.