To expand on copperx, they might be. Since you can have several versions of a lib installed and the kernel<->userspace interface is stable, if you can get the o

To expand on copperx, they might be. Since you can have several versions of a lib installed and the kernel<->userspace interface is stable, if you can get the old versions you need for your distro, then you can run the application. At worst, you might need to compile from source (which I do realise can take a lot of time and effort). So the kind-of proper answer to that question is, "if you want to run a popular old application on a popular current distro, there is probably a repository you can pull packages from that will allow you to do it, otherwise it's somewhat of a crapshoot".