The person having to maintain this must be in a world of hurt. Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? Still, maintaining such an old codebase while the rest of the world moves on...ugh...

I'm wondering how the maintenance effort would be organised.

Would it be existing teams in the main functional areas (networking, file systems, user space tools, kernel, systemd &c) keeping the packages earmarked as 'legacy add-on' as they age out of the usual LTS, old LTS, oldold LTS and so on?

Or would it in fact be a special team so people spending most of their working week on the legacy add-on?

Does Canonical have teams that map to each release, tracking it down through the stages or do they have functional teams that work on streams of packages that age through?

Maybe I'm the odd one out but I love doing stuff that has long term stability written all over it. In fact the IT world moving as fast as it does is one of my major frustrations. Professionally I have to keep up so I'm reading myself absolutely silly but it is getting to the point where I expect that one of these days I'll end up being surprised because a now 'well known technique' was completely unknown to me.

You're not adding new features and such like that. Just patching security vulnerabilities in a forked branch.

Sure, you won't get the niceties of modern developments, but at least you have access to all of the source code and a working development environment.

On the other hand: dealing with 14.04 is practically cutting edge compared to stuff still using AIX and HPUX, which were outdated even 20 years ago lol

Some people just want a job, they don’t wrap up their sense of self worth in it.

Most people I know don’t like chasing the latest framework that everyone will forget about in 6 months.

IME (do note, the things I've dealt with were obsolete for a much shorter time), such work isn't particularly ugly even though the idea of it is. Some of it will feel like cheating because you just need to paraphrase a fix, some of it will be difficult because critical parts don't exist yet. Maybe you'll get to implement a tiny version of a new feature.

> Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing?

There are more people like that than one might think.

There's a sizable community of people who still play old video games. There are people who meticulously maintain 100 year old cars, restore 500 year old works of art, and find their passion in exploring 1000 year old buildings.

The HN front page still gets regular posts lamenting loss of the internet culture of the 80s and 90s, trying to bring back what they perceive as lost. I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.