In business terms, open-sourcing a piece of software they haven't touched for ten years means spending a number of hours on doing that for no obvious gain¹. Legal has to clear this for approval (risks? liability?), someone has to decide if opening up the code won't give away company IP, and someone has to actually find the source code (not a given at all), put a licence on it (going through legal again), upload it, and provide a minimum level of documentation.
Doing nothing on the other hand, costs nothing.
1: There is the positive marketing you gain from such a move, but someone has to quantify if doing this is worth it.
That's fair, but I still don't see why that somehow means that the OS vendor should therefore be expected to keep that code working in perpetuity. I have no love for Apple or MacOS, but I just don't see how they're ultimately the ones who should be blamed for this situation.
> The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit architecture and hasn’t been updated in well over 10 years. Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and refuse to open source it to allow others to do that, so you are stuck using an OS that can run it.
It's fine if the scanner company doesn't think it's worth putting in the work to add 64-bit support to their software themselves, but they're the ones artificially making it harder to support indefinitely by keeping the code private despite seemingly having no plans to ever sell anything that uses it again. It seems weird to me to blame OS vendors for operating in bad faith when the people who own the actual code that no longer works aren't even willing to let anyone else attempt to do the work to update it for them.