[petree]

Either pay someone to maintain it for as long as you need or engineer around whatever issues you encounter; it's a you problem, and possibly the development process or software stack you are using is not flexible or robust enough to support your own usecase. Unless you specifically pay for how many years of support you need, then you don't get to decide the terms of whatever support is offered for free.

[crabbone]

This is a stupid advice.

In software industry we rely on the community to carry the large share of our "expenses". A company that manufactures medical equipment, let's say, pulseox, would normally need well... maybe five engineers working on the project. If suddenly, they also need to maintain a Linux distribution used for their device, they'd need like fifty. This would make pulsox prohibitively expensive and the company would go out of business. Only companies who'd be able to manufacture pulseox would be the companies who are already doing Linux maintainer work internally. Which would eventually lead to a monopoly, and the prices would still shoot through the roof.

But it doesn't have to be this way. If we collectively understand that there's a problem with the absence of real long-term-support releases, then many smaller companies can survive and produce cheap equipment.

Finally, there's no "natural" rate at which software needs to upgrade. There's no reason it shouldn't upgrade slower or faster. The claim the author makes is that hardware used to fall apart in about five years, and that could've been used to justify the short-term support it was getting from software... about 20-30 years ago. But things changed, and we learned how to make hardware that easily lasts 15 years and now we need to re-think how we are dealing with this fact.

[msh]

I dont think its stupid advice to ask people to choose their tools based on their needs.

If you need 15 year support you choose software that will provide that and not something that does not promise that.

Just as if you are building a house in greenland you would choose different building styles and material compared to building a house in california. His complaints seem more like building a cheap california house in greenland and then complaining that its a bad house.