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Originally Posted by murraypaul
That is a stretch.
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No, it isn't. I've worked for several helpdesks in the past, for very big manufacturers. You *don't* want to know how many times I needed to tell a customer "No Sir, I am sorry. There will not be a new driver to support this device under this new Windows version." Some of those devices were only a year old. Most of the time, the resulting answer was: "Then I will *never* buy a ..... device again!" Sadly, all manufacturers do the same.
Not writing a new driver, is akin to dropping the use of an older file format on a new device, or dropping the service for drm'ed products. In all cases, you lose access to your device or data. Sometimes, you lose access to the data because the device can't be used. Not because it's defective, but because the manufacturer decided that it was too old to be of use and stopped supporting it.
It's called "planned obsolescence", and it's the one thing I'm afraid of with regard to ebooks (and any other digital data such as pictures and music).
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It will work for as long as someone is bothered to maintain the driver.
At some point, if someone cannot be found to maintain it, and it breaks as a result of another change, it will be dropped.
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Seeing that even quite some stuff from the nineties still works (I recently installed a scanner from 1998 on the latest Fedora for someone, from a company that doesn't even exist anymore), I fancy that this doesn't happen too often, save for very old devices.