it might be a download away, or it might be permanently unavailable

Which was the usual way things were on UNIX, thanks Sun, before GNU/Linux became relevant.

no, there was a brief period of time where sun decided to try to imitate microsoft in this stupidity, but fortunately none of the other unix vendors followed suit

First of all, everyone else was doing the same outside UNIX in the 1980's.

Secondly, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, DG/UX were the same in what concerns having to buy a UNIX developers license for the compilers.

So other UNIX vendors did follow suit, and I can't be bothered to dive into BYTE and DDJ ads from 1980 - 1990's to add others to the list.

though i never bought one myself, i never saw an aix or irix box without compilers installed, and don't have any personal experience with hp-ux and dg/ux, but it was only for solaris that the fsf decided they had to put up precompiled gcc binaries on their ftp site because the vendor wasn't shipping one

Why would it be permanently unavailable?

that's what always happens to downloads

like 90% of my links from 8 years ago are 404 now

The compiler from 8 years ago is very likely obsolete. If it was relevant, you'd have stored it somewhere safe or you'd have a support contract with Microsoft.

the compiler from 8 years ago can still build code that works on the operating system from 8 years ago; the new compiler often cannot, even if it does exist

it may well be obsolete in the sense that the new compiler is more convenient to use and produces more efficient code, but that's irrelevant

software doesn't rot like the potatoes you forgot about in the fridge

your argument is contingent on the presumption that people never do stupid things that cause them damage in the future. but if that were true, nobody would buy cigarettes, or for that matter microsoft windows, in the first place

Software indeed rots because it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Requirements change, bugs are discovered, support declines unless you give golden coins to someone. Infinite backwards compatibility is the exception rather than the normal.

My point still stands: the compiler should have been kept around if it is required to keep something business-critical on an 8 year old machine running. Whether such old versions of compilers are still provided depends on the goodwill of Microsoft.

it seems that somewhere in the thread you went from arguing against my position to arguing in favor of it

We also shifted away from discussing what an end user needs (a recent OS, probably no compilers unless they develop software, and if they do, a recent one) to what one would need if stuck with a legacy hardware or software stack.