This is an "I told you so" moment for a lot of Free software advocates.
As a free software advocate, there isn't a group of "some users" whom I get to point at and say "I told you so": in fact, most of the people who played Trainyard and enjoyed it probably don't even care that it is going to be inaccessible. And while I sort of care myself about some specific applications, it isn't about people like me either. The devastating reality is that this purge of 32-bit software combined with the centralized control on the computers that are capable of running it is a devastating blow to society as a whole, and the people who are causing it are the people who either don't directly feel the downsides (as historical preservation is an externality, like pollution) or are actually in the minority of people who experience an upside.
Advocating for free software is good as it can be a weapon in this fight, but in practice Apple just isn't feeling the burn: when they wanted a new compiler, they hired a ton of engineers and wrote one so they didn't have to rely on gcc anymore. There is only so much power in the lever of free software to force societal change in a way that doesn't continually lead to a handful of resistance fighters looking at the carnage of the land and thinking "I know what will make me feel better: I'll point at the majority of people who don't even understand this enough to notice and the handful of people who are happy this happened and yell 'I told you so'", particularly when developers like Linus Torvalds, who have critically important positions, aren't fighting for the same battle.
My claim: we need regulation. In the same sense that we have regulation about pollution--to keep a handful of people who benefit from pollution enough to not care about its downsides to society (and them) from doing horrible things--we need to regulate companies like Apple to force them to provide open platforms and to have some reasonable set of responsibilities when it comes to sunsetting older hardware. The issue of closed vs. open ecosystems is related to free software, but isn't the same, and we need to be paying a lot more attention to the former and avoid a lot of knee jerk to the latter if we want to prevent some of the worst case scenarios.
We already have this. Copyright gives Apple a legal monopoly on iOS. It isn't supposed to give Apple a monopoly on the distribution of third party iOS apps. That's just the sort of monopoly leveraging the antitrust laws are intended to deal with.
And if you don't like AT&T, all you have to do is sell your house and move out of their service area. Unless you make phones or modems or are an ISP; then even moving doesn't help you because you can't move your customers.
I also see this somewhat as a 'own your st' scenario. Apple makes all of these systems and platforms, and then proceeds to abandon them, producing waste (in both materials and developer time for the apps that get updated for nothing but compatibility reasons).
They update their APIs, deprecate the old stuff, at a breakneck pace, and they leave a great mess behind. They should be forced to think more about the mess they are making, and be unable to leave it without penalties. One way for them to not leave it would be to open it up. Another way would be to support older versions for a longer timeframe, and allow users to continue to download and use them.
Either way, it's not in Apple's interests to do this - they're much more content to force this crap down our throats, and rely on us just dealing with it because there really isn't any choice.
Apple is continuously improving and modernizing it's platform. They should be banning hundreds of thousands of zombie apps that haven't been touched in many years because they are not valuable and misleading to customers. But they don't, they allow you to keep your apps available on the store no matter how old or how poorly written. Finally they have their first platform change that's going to break them, and they can automatically boot them. That's a very good thing.
It's far more important that the apps remain usable to their end users than it is that they adapt perfectly to a slightly larger screen size :s
Apple's development platform moves too quickly for many developers to keep pace with. It's not that all these apps are not valuable or misleading to customers.
This is a player that works just fine on Windows 10, and there's definitely a case to be made that it's better [overall] than any more modern alternative.
This type of software can never happen on iOS, and is quickly becoming a relic on Mac OS.
The core principles of good software haven't changed much over the years. UI (in HCI terms) has in many ways not moved forward much at all. Apple are changing their platform it seems, more for the sake of change, than for the sake of real progress. And they're forcing some really good software out because of it.
This sort of regulation is terrible, and in my opinion should be resisted. It institutionalizes the worst tendencies of open source - free riding and slowing progress due to community restrictions.
At best, a community will be a thriving organic set of users and contributors. At worst, they are abusive parasites to the core maintainers.
The former has its own future guaranteed - customers care about a thing and are investing in it. The latter however is far more common - everyone wants something for nothing.
The world is built on organizations that need revenue to continue their mission and fulfill customer needs. Forcing companies to allocate resources to the past, the obsolete, that which customers do not want to pay for, hurts society far more than letting products die of obsolescence.
A compromise might exist where a portion of copyright law and/or taxes are allocated to preserve certain works, which would capture a balance between the economic need to create the future and the social need to preserve tradition and past practices, but that's tricky a level of nuance for policy.
If you don't like Apple's house, you don't have to live there. There are many free software projects that you can use for your phone, pc, etc.
The reality of most liner software is that scads if it go out of support all the time and only users that are members of the developer elite (and happen to be skilled in the relevant platform, libraries and dev tools) have even a chance of doing anything about it.
That's only true for things for which there isn't even one user who is a developer, who fixes your problem because it was also their problem.
Is this though? How much of the impacted software would exist as free software?