Why Internal Patching Strategies Break Down in Year Two

When an open source component reaches end-of-life (EOL), the typical first instinct is to triage internally. For organizations that aren’t ready to migrate, the fallback plan is often:
"We'll patch it ourselves."

At first glance, this seems like a responsible and agile response. Your team creates a fork of the library or framework, applies critical fixes when needed, and continues using the software while keeping the roadmap intact.

But internal patching strategies—especially for foundational OSS components—rarely scale beyond the first year. Over time, what began as a practical workaround becomes a fragile, expensive, and often unsustainable liability.

At HeroDevs, we’ve worked with dozens of engineering organizations that attempted internal maintenance before ultimately transitioning to long-term support. In nearly every case, the internal strategy failed not because of a lack of effort, but because it was structurally flawed from the start.

This blog explains why internal patching strategies break down after the first year, and what technical leaders can do instead.

‍

Year One: Initial Success Masks Long-Term Complexity

In the first few months after a project reaches EOL, internal patching appears manageable. Security and DevOps teams identify known vulnerabilities using scanner tools like Snyk or Mend, apply one-off fixes, and redeploy as needed.

There’s usually a small number of critical patches to apply. Teams may use ad hoc processes like:

• Forking the library into a private repo
• Backporting a fix from a newer version
• Modifying the build pipeline to inject the patched version
• Manually updating vulnerable files

At this point, the team is confident: we’ve got this under control.

But this sense of control is temporary. And here's why.

‍

Year Two: The Cracks Start to Show

By the time you reach the 12–18 month mark of maintaining your own fork or patched build, several challenges emerge—each one compounding the next.

1. Patch Ownership Gets Murky

Who’s responsible for tracking new CVEs? Who validates upstream issues? Who ensures that patches are safe to apply without breaking production systems?

As staffing changes or teams shift focus, institutional knowledge about the patched component begins to degrade. Eventually, no one wants to “own” the fork—and when a new vulnerability surfaces, nobody is sure how to respond.

2. Test Coverage Is Incomplete—or Nonexistent

Your original unit and integration tests weren’t designed to validate deep changes in third-party code. And when your team applies new patches to an old fork, regression risk increases.

Teams often skip building a comprehensive test harness around the forked library, assuming limited changes will reduce breakage. But after a year, the patch set grows—and the chance of inadvertently altering behavior rises with it.

3. Upstream Changes Become Irrelevant

The longer a fork diverges from the upstream project, the less it benefits from any future security or performance improvements—even if the project reactivates or receives community attention.

Eventually, your patched fork is no longer “Lodash with some patches”—it’s a custom dependency with no compatibility guarantees, no support, and no roadmap.

4. Engineering Time Quietly Disappears

When new CVEs are disclosed, your team must:

• Review the vulnerability
• Determine if your fork is affected
• Design and test a fix
• Validate across environments
• Write release documentation

What initially felt like a few hours a month becomes a recurring drag on engineering bandwidth. That time is pulled from your roadmap and often assigned to senior engineers who can least afford the distraction.

5. Audit and Compliance Break Down

As forks become more divergent, producing security documentation becomes harder. Can you prove that a given vulnerability was patched? Can you demonstrate a secure update path? What will your auditor say about your maintenance strategy?

Most internal patching efforts lack the audit trail, versioning discipline, or SLAs that compliance teams expect. This can derail audits or delay enterprise deals—especially when buyers ask for SBOMs or CVE attestations.

‍

The Strategic Problem: You’ve Become the Maintainer

At some point in year two, reality sets in: you’re no longer just using open source—you’re maintaining it.

That means:

• You assume security liability
• You’re responsible for support timelines
• You must manage documentation and upgrade paths
• You carry key-person risk around the custom codebase
• You’ve created a “parallel project” with no exit strategy

This is rarely the intended outcome. Most teams that set out to patch internally are simply trying to buy time. But without formal guardrails, that temporary fix becomes permanent—and fragile.

‍

The Alternative: Professional Long-Term Support

At HeroDevs, we built Never-Ending Support (NES) to help engineering teams exit this spiral.

Instead of maintaining fragile internal forks, you can:

• Stay on your current version
• Receive production-ready security patches
• Meet audit and compliance requirements
• Free your engineers from custom maintenance
• Buy time to modernize—on your terms

We support EOL versions of Node.js, AngularJS, Lodash, Spring, Tomcat, and more. All patches are delivered under SLA and designed for drop-in integration, so you can secure your stack without rebuilding it.

‍

Final Thought: Don’t Let Short-Term Fixes Become Long-Term Risk

Internal patching may work for a quarter or two. But by the second year, what was once a proactive fix often becomes a liability.

If your team is managing forks, chasing CVEs, or maintaining OSS in the dark—it’s time to consider a better path.

HeroDevs offers that path. And we can help you reclaim your roadmap, reduce risk, and remove friction from your open source lifecycle.

‍