Dropping support for JRE 1.3
java
Solution
Sun allows you to buy support packages for depreciated software such as JRE 1.4. For banks and some other organizations, paying $100,000 per year for support of an outdated product is cheaper than upgrading. I would suggest only offering paid support for JRE 1.3. If anyone needs support for this, they can pay for a hefty support package. You would then shelve your current 1.3 code base, and if a customer with a support contract requires a bug fix, then you could fix the 1.3 version for them, which would likely just mean selectively applying a patch from a more recent version.
Problem
We provide a popular open source Java FTP library called edtFTPj. We would like to drop support for JRE 1.3 - this would clean up the code base and also allow us to more easily use JRE 1.4 features (without resorting to reflection etc). The JRE 1.3 is over 7 years old now! Is anyone still using JRE 1.3 out there? Is anyone aware of any surveys that give an idea of what percentage of users are still using 1.3?