[jenadine]

The thing with free software is that you are in no position to demand anything. If the maintainer don't feel like supporting your hardware, they don't have to.

But the beauty of free software is that you can always do it yourself. (Or pay someone to do it)

[shadowgovt]

If anything, this can be read as, while an inconvenience, an open source success story.

All pieces of the puzzle were open enough that the author could track down the problem and correct it. That, not indefinite support for no-longer-manufactured hardware, is the benefit of open source. It's the thing that enables the other thing.

And thanks to the magic of the internet, blogs, and search engines, now that one person has solved the problem there's a cracking chance that the next person to have the problem will find the solution.

[_chu1]

This is true for Windows. Free software has helped keep operating systems like Windows XP and 7 still modern and secure, and many applications have been patched to work on these older systems. Here is for instance a port of Firefox Quantum to XP and a fork of Chromium maintaining support for 7, but I like to stick to the last Ungoogled Chromium version because I hate Google.

https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68 https://github.com/win32ss/supermium