Even then, who cares. Software developers didn't have to explicitly support BSD, if there was a BSD user who cared enough they'd work on getting your package in

Even then, who cares. Software developers didn't have to explicitly support BSD, if there was a BSD user who cared enough they'd work on getting your package in the ports tree. If there was a Debian or Red Hat user that cared enough they'd make a .deb or .rpm. None of this has changed, what HAS changed is library and application developers deciding to say "screw people using existing releases, I'm only putting bugfixes and security updates in the newest release so anyone still using 1.x and caring about stability can sod off". I package software I care about, but libraries in particular are notorious for not maintaining any semblance of ABI or API compatibility even between minor releases these days. It's increasingly difficult to support this when I have to rebuild or update multiple applications that depend on a library because they decided to make huge breaking changes in a point release or they won't provide any bugfixes for the major release I'm still on.