> Being forgiving towards the user is one of the important principles of programming. Because the user may not be able to “upgrade” his system.

Yes. If there is one thing I wish I could drill into every programmer's head, it's that not breaking stuff for your users is the #1 most important thing. There is one of you, and there may be many thousands of users. You putting in the extra effort means saving thousands of times of effort from your downstream users. Sometimes breakage unavoidable, but those instances should be rare, extremely well communicated, and felt as a failure to be learned from and avoided in the future. I don't care how ugly it makes things for you, your users are paramount.

> not breaking stuff for your users is the #1 most important thing

I would say that's #2. #1 is to never cause data loss.

This isn’t even a moral principal - design systems and projects according to this discipline and you yourself will be repaid in extra robustness and less work in the long run, as well as happier users. Plus it is fun coming up with work around for obscure corner cases.

Yet asking for windows 95 support on most open source bug trackers will get a reaction between being laughed off the tracker or "do it yourself, but we'll reject the PR if it makes too much of a mess". I don't see why legacy commercial Unix deserves any higher level of support these days.

Just because some projects (OSS or not) decide on a certain policy doesn't mean that the policy is necessarily good, or that any other projects should follow suit. Whether or not this is a reasonable stance depends on the project and the target demographic.

Did not say so. Only that if one does do it, one is being understanding.

Did not say it has to be done.

Outside of very specific situations that you'll know if you're in them, when are you expecting someone to simultaneously (a) insist on running ancient software that they can't update to decades-old standards and (b) run your new software?

> Windows 95 is still very much alive.

Can you share any examples/use-cases? I'm not doubting you, I'm just very, very curious.

In 2011 a customer I worked with was using Windows 95 still in a test bed for their legacy equipment. The test software they had was written for it, and it still worked, so no need to go through the massive pain of updating. But even that was 12 years ago and we expected it to fall apart any day...

A friend of mine still helps out a number of local businesses running their old MS-DOS Point Of Sales terminal software, as well as old high end printing hardware at a print shop. It works, and replacements aren't worth the CapEx as they're doing just fine. Migration has real costs, like losing the customer database for a mechanic's garage or buying a new 6 digit printer for the print shop.

this is a perfect example of how UN*Xoids like to enamor themselves that they are the last bastion of responsible devs maintaining the 30 year old system that was never good to begin with from breaking