One often overlooked feature shared by technical and real debt is discharge via bankruptcy. One of the impediments to understanding technical debt, I think, is that our primary experience with bankruptcy is with personal bankruptcy and it's potential effects on credit score. When technical debt is discharged via bankruptcy, it is more like commercial bankruptcy...it's an organization or a project that dissolves with the debt and there are no direct personal consequences for an individual's credit score.<p>To put it another way, technical debt doesn't have to be repaid if the product/project/company fails. Even better it doesn't have to be repaid if the company succeeds to a scale where the library/product/project becomes obsolescent and must be replaced for reasons that could not have been reasonably anticipated at the time the first iteration was created.