[wang_li]

> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.

You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.

Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.

[a1o]

CMake is a bad example, you can build latest CMake and run it on Debian Jessie. It will work perfectly. CMake is the thing you can build on really old compilers.

[realusername]

Open source is better because as long as you have a single developer caring to maintain the device, it will still be there.

Bus mouse support isn't removed because it's old but because it's been broken since 2015 and nobody noticed.

[gzread]

Open source is better because if you need the device driver then you can step up to maintain it yourself. It doesn't mean someone else will magically do it for you. I've used devices with very obscure incantations to get some random person's hack to run on Linux that worked natively on Windows.