If we would pay for support contracts I'm sure Nokia would put pay more effort in backwards compatibility.

Meanwhile, there is community effort project like Mer. If you appreciate that effort maybe contribute to that.

To ease pain of lack of backwards compatibility knowing in advance the path of compatibility is useful, and these paths are more clear with Maemo 5 and Maemo 6. For Maemo 5 has been pretty clear to me ever since Fanoush posted about Linux kernel changes by Nokia.

There is also retroactive work to get functionality in older devices. While Apple enables FM on their iPhoneOS devices... OK, enjoy. I rather have full Bluetooth profiles, and thank Nokia for providing hardware rendering on unsupported devices, while Jobs forced me to pay 10 USD for iPhoneOS 3.0 only to figure out his definition of Bluetooth support equals 'AD2P profile'.

These iPhoneOS devices have been existing for 2 - 2,5 year, 3 generations, and did not have radical changes, nor have the advantages of open source drivers and such. That is not to say Apple is doing bad in this way; I applaud that they maintain firmware fon different devices, but question is when their support is going to end. Also, I already heard announcements of Leopard being unsupported leaving my Mac unpatched while Microsoft supported XP longer than Tiger. Heck, I still receive security patches formy Windows XP.

Speaking of which IMO the absolute bottom-line is security and reliability fixes. These should be free, for a period longer than 1 year, but I've already posted a few times about that recently.