Comment by rollcat

As michaelmior has already noted, Linux is not an OS. Anyone is free to take the sources and do as they wish (modulo GPL), which is what a lot of people did. Those people owe you nothing.

But consider FreeBSD. Contrary to Linux, it is a full, standalone operating system, just like Windows or macOS. It has pretty decent compatibility guarantees for each major release (~5 years of support). It also has an even more liberal license (it boils down to "do as you wish but give us credit").

Consider macOS. Apple keeps supporting 7yro hardware with new releases, and even after that keeps the security patches flowing for a while. Yet still, they regularly cull backwards compatibility to keep moving forward (e.g. ending support for 32-bit Intel executables to pave the way for Arm64).

Windows is the outlier here. Microsoft is putting insane amounts of effort into maintaining backwards compatibility, and they are able to do so only because of their unique market position.