How long can older versions of linux distro be kept alive?

[Richard Reina]

I have since about 2005 been using Gammu https://wammu.eu/gammu/ to send and receive sms text messages from computers that don't have stable direct internet access. Over the years I have turned about a dozen machines into SMS gateways and as of a few years ago have began to use Rasberry Pis whenever I need to build/replace an SMS gateway. These machines do almost nothing more than send and receive sms messages, they are not even connected to wifi. However, after Gammu version of 1.38, which is included with Raspbian Stretch, the new releases have basically not worked, at least for the GSM Modems that I have tried them with. Here is my Github post that explains this in more detail: https://github.com/gammu/gammu/issues/680 --skip to the end for my thesis. Since mid-2019 Gammu has been looking for a new maintainer https://github.com/gammu/gammu/issues/475 and this outfit https://www.smseagle.eu/ has agreed to take over the maintenance and further development of the code. As you can see from their website they offer their own, rather expensive, commercial sms gateways. And since their taking control we've had gammu 1.40, 1.41 and 1.42 released which seem to not work or at least not as well as version 1.38. My questions are the following:

1) Is there a possible conflict of interest in a company that sells commercial sms gateways taking over the code for the most viable free sms gateway--reminds me of Oracle and MySQL, or am I wrong to be suspicious? 

2) Being that the Raspian Stretch/Perl/Gammu-1.38/Gammu-smsd-1.38 stack work perfectly for me, how long can I expect Raspbian Stretch to stick around. I found this archive but don't know how reliable it is or how long it will endure. https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/ Do I need to download and save my own images? Is there anything I am possibly missing with the proposed strategy of holding on to an old distro version for years to come?

Thank you in advance for any insight or ideas.

Richard

[eviljoel]

Hello Richard,

Not a direct answer to your question, but somewhat related. There is
this active, open source project that apparently works as an SMS to XMPP
gateway: https://soprani.ca/ I haven't tried it yet.

Laters,
eviljoel

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