The Linux world would benefit strongly from having a much bigger commitment to backwards compatibility in foundational libraries. Obviously there is nobody who

The Linux world would benefit strongly from having a much bigger commitment to backwards compatibility in foundational libraries. Obviously there is nobody who can force e.g. OpenSSL to keep supporting old versions or to provide them as wrappers over the latest version, or to force GTK to keep around working versions of libraries exposing all interfaces dating from GTK 1.0 onwards. But if we could have a project to do just that, that would be great. We all want people to move with the times and adopt new versions of their dependencies so security exploits can be patched, but right now if you're writing software for Linux, either you package all your dependencies with it (forever calcifying all security exploits), or you keep on top of all updates of everything you use, or your software simply won't run within a couple of years. The open source community lives and dies by the ability of users to run existing software. Effectively continually deleting open source software from existence, while windows keeps supporting every single program written since 30 years ago, means we're always falling behind in usefulness. There ought to exist an organisation dedicated to maintaining old versions of widely used system libraries either in their original form, or as wrappers over the new versions (to the extent possible), so that people can rely on their existing software. Since we're talking about open source, that would mean maintaining the development kits as well, so old source can be built on new systems. It makes no sense to just let all this work rot, it is our greatest treasure.