I agree. When OSS goes out of service on legacy systems which are still used in production, this could provide a way to substitute blocks of code for the more secure code path. It looks like legacy security may have been the prime motivation. In these systems you're not calling a help desk due to their age and typically these environments have qualification test that could be employed for sanity checking the setup.
If the assumptions I made are correct, the larger question is if the physical security of these machines doesn't mitigate software exposures. These tend not to be on outward facing networks.
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I agree. When OSS goes out of service on legacy systems which are still used in production, this could provide a way to substitute blocks of code for the more secure code path. It looks like legacy security may have been the prime motivation. In these systems you're not calling a help desk due to their age and typically these environments have qualification test that could be employed for sanity checking the setup. If the assumptions I made are correct, the larger question is if the physical security of these machines doesn't mitigate software exposures. These tend not to be on outward facing networks.