can the community support devices "indefinitely"?

can the community support devices "indefinitely"?

Posted Dec 21, 2005 9:12 UTC (Wed) by wilck (subscriber, #29844)
In reply to: MUST note if drivers are OSS - and the FSF has such a list! by dwheeler
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"

no hardware vendor can afford to support old cards indefinitely.

Neither can the community. See how many old drivers are being kicked out of the kernel because they're unmaintained or have become non-functional over time? It is a Linux myth that the community supports old hardware forever. All you can reasonably say is that if the driver is free, it remains theoretically possible to port it to recent kernels.

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