What Works Today Should Work Tomorrow: notes from a 23-year codebase (froscon2026)

Right to repair is usually a hardware story, but open-source infrastructure faces its own version: the discipline of keeping software actually working over decades. NetXMS started in 2003 and still runs on AIX, Solaris, older RHEL, Windows 7 kiosks, and a long tail of 32-bit ARM, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Alpine - users who didn't choose to be a long tail, but chose stability. For them, the contract…