This is not a flatpak request. I would just like to know Flathub’s (and others) position on legacy app support. In this post I am defending the idea that Flatpak should be used to resurrect quality discontinued apps or keep stuff on life support until it is ported to GTK3, python3 ect… as opposed to letting things just die. It is far less of a security risk because of the sand boxing and network disabling. High quality discontinued apps such as (Jokosher, CelestiaQT, mhwavedit, Gnash SWF viewer, Ekiga, and much more exist. Linux and GPL in general has a small pool of software in general for non-programming task and every time we lose a title it is a monumental shame because it hurts the minority audience of front end workers on Linux.
Windows has extremely long term back/forward compatibility. Mac has about six years or so of back/forward compatibility, but Linux has next to no binary support and I hope flatpak can fix this. I am not saying we should indefinitely hoard flatpaks and waste disk space, but instead of deleting old stuff it can be put on https://www.archive.org and valuable apps that are “endangered/recently discontinued” should be given a few years time on Flathub to encourage people to fork them. Everyone knows Linux is extremely favorable to programmers and sysadmins, but struggles with quality front end production and work software. If we want Linux to be more helpful for people who do presentation and graphical work/hobbies (like myself) you would consider using Flatpak to temporarily rescue recently discontinued apps.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please consider and ponder upon this idea.