If an application is 10 years old, consider running it inside a VM running a legacy OS, or partitioning your drive. APIs can and will change and so will security models, and this isn't restricted to any particular OS or vendor. 

Vista introduced a more secure memory access model which broke a number of applications using the Postgres SQL backend. Unfortunately you can't just swap out a dynamically linked library with a newer one (in pretty much any OS), so the applications themselves had to be rebuilt against the Vista-compatible version of Postgres. 

OS X has progressively dropped support for a number of legacy APIs and has successively tightened application access to the filesystem with each release. 

The only reason desktop Linux users are insulated from this is because the userbase gets its software from repositories synchronized to OS/kernel releases so the updates happen automatically. Corporate users of enterprise Linux applications that don't/can't come in the form of source code or package manager installs are in the same boat as the rest of us.