That's true with commercial software, but we see similar issues with OSS software. It's not easy for any software producer to maintain an island of stable backports as the surrounding ecosystems move forward. The closest we have are LTS versions of operating systems.

But we don't yet know whether the market would pay for stable app versions that are encapsulated to remain compatible with new hardware and operating systems. The presence of client hypervisors on Windows 10 and OS X will enable new experiments. Perhaps a company can devise a marketing message, business model and toolchain which supports stability and forward-compatibility.