You can still find these downloads here:
https://dl.bintray.com/openhab/mvn/org/openhab/distribution/1.8.3/
There’s also a Docker image for 1.8.3 you can use (even an ARM64 one), see:
2 Likes
I’m not going to address most of what has already been addressed. But I will answer the “What are you doing?” part.
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I don’t expect software to remain static. I expect it to be constantly changing and many of those changes are going to be breaking.
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openHAB integrates with a lot of external stuff that might change without our even being involved. APIs close down or modified. Recently Amazon changed something for Alexa that uncovered a memory leak in OH code.
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The comparison of openHAB configs to sendmail configs is not an apt one. When you configure openHAB you are building software. You are not turning on/off some configuratio switches, you are building a fully fledged application. As such, see the first bullet, software is always changing.
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It is dangerous to continue to run old software. There are many many known vulnerabilities in all old software. This forces you to remain vulnerable or upgrade.
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If you upgrade early and often, the amount of work gets spread out over time to the point where it becomes almost nothing. For example, if one sticks with the milestone releases once a month, there might be 10 minutes worth of work if there is a minor breaking change. However, if you wait years between upgrades, you are likely going to have to all but start over from scratch. So I upgrade very frequently. Most of the time nothing goes wrong and and all is good. Rarely just one thing will go wrong and its relatively easy to research and solve it. If I wait a long time to upgrade though, there will be so many changes and so many breaking changes that it becomes a herculean effort to figure out what changed and how to fix it.
So in short, I don’t have unrealistic expectations from any software based device. Most especially not for software built and maintained by volunteers. The choice is either never change anything (moving to a new machine is a change, as is updating the OS or JVM or anything else) in which case you are better off using microcontrollers instead of openHAB, or understand that the openHAB system is going to take some maintenance time constantly and forever. There really is no middle ground. And the same applies for commercial home automation systems like SmartThings as well.
3 Likes
I stand corrected. Thanks.
Well, thanks all for your thoughts. Obviously, my expectations didn’t match with the scope of this project. I wasn’t aware, that the approach of most of you is indeed to regulary keep the software updated and fix minor issues caused by the update immediately. My approach was to set this thing up once and run it untouched as long as it fits the needs. Of course I didn’t expect new features or bindings to be backported to outdated versions, but keeping the old versions running. Thought wrong. I will reconsider my options in migrating to OH2 or OH3 or give the docker thing a try (Thank you very much for this hint, I didn’t see it while searching for LXC solutions :-/ ).
Nevertheless thank you very much for the work on this project. It did its job very well over the years and I’m sure I find a solution to continue using it in the future. With adjusted expectations to backwards compatibility 
Regards,
Sebastian
2 Likes
It does still run. I know, I’m running a copy - as it happens on old PC platform. Old PC platforms remain available in case of fire and theft etc. 
The most annoying thing is Yahoo Weather ceasing … the world moved on regardless of what openhab wanted.
I still think you’d be pushing your luck expecting it to work on a platform that didn’t exist when development ceased. But you can certainly try.
It is true that most OH users are tinkerers, enthusiasts, whatever you want to call it.