On Tue, 12 Jan 2021, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
There has to be a healthy balance between hobbyist and commercial use.
Yes, both of those, and everything in-between, including for-profit businesses that serve mostly hobbyists. Also start-up companies that may never be commercially viable (which is most of them). And don't forget government and non-government organisations, not-for-profit organisations, charities, etc.
I understand that from a commercial point of view, it doesn't make much sense to run Linux on a 30-year-old computer.
It ain't necessarily so. I would be surprised if there are no Linux VMs running on old corporate mainframes right now. But the age of the hardware is largely irrelevant. If you're a museum interested in cultural artifacts from decades past, or if you're a business doing data recovery, you're going to need to operate those platforms. Once removed from mainline Linux, a port becomes basically frozen, and may not be compatible with future emulators, which are a moving target. I say that because last year I fixed bugs in Linux/m68k that made it incomatible with recent QEMU releases (it was only compatible with old QEMU releases).
