Executive Summary

Roughly 400,000 organizations still run business-critical Linux binaries and stacks that are difficult or costly to rewrite, creating a roughly $4.8B addressable market at an estimated $12K ACV per customer. These engineering and ops teams face brittle dependencies, distro and kernel ABI drift, security patching gaps, and high mean-time-to-repair when old apps break in modern infrastructure; the result is repeated firefighting, compliance risk, and deferred modernization projects. You could build an automated compatibility sandbox service that recreates historical runtime environments as portable, isolated artifacts using container and WASM-based sandboxes, automated dependency resolution, deterministic build recipes, and LLM-assisted patch and build-script generation to accelerate break/fix cycles. The product would provide reproducible "time-capsule" runtime images, CI/CD integration, automated test harnesses, observability for compatibility regressions, and an optional SLA-backed managed compatibility layer for legacy apps that cannot be rewritten immediately. Timing favors this approach: enterprises increasingly choose to run or incrementally modernize legacy apps rather than rewrite them, LLMs now materially reduce the manual effort of synthesizing patches and build scripts, and mature container/WASM runtimes make safe, portable sandboxes practical. Competition is medium — from vendor support, consultancies, and general container tooling — so differentiation will require deep systems-level compatibility engineering (binary and syscall-level workarounds), a curated library of historical runtime images, deterministic reproducibility, and enterprise-grade security and compliance features; technical complexity in edge-case syscall behavior and a nontrivial sales motion are the main challenges. If your team has kernel/userland debugging expertise and enterprise sales capability, this is a high-potential opportunity worth pursuing; if not, consider partnering with systems engineers or starting with a focused vertical pilot to de-risk development.

Executive Summary

Market Opportunity

Run & revive legacy Linux apps with automated compatibility sandboxes targets a $4.8B = 400K organizations with legacy Linux dependencies x $12K ACV (maintenance+compatibility tooling/support) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of ~15% (app modernization & dev tooling growth).

Key trends driving demand: app-modernization -- Enterprises prioritize running or modernizing legacy apps rather than rewriting them, creating demand for compatibility tooling; ai-assisted-development -- LLMs can synthesize patches and build scripts, drastically reducing manual troubleshooting time; containerization & wasm -- Mature runtimes make shipping portable, sandboxed legacy environments practical and secure; open-source archival -- Growing corpuses of archived projects increase the supply of legacy software that needs compatibility work.

Key competitors include CodeWeavers (CrossOver), Docker Inc. (Docker + Docker Hub), NixOS / Nixpkgs & GNU Guix (reproducible-build eco), Red Hat (Application Modernization & Consulting).

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Run & revive legacy Linux apps with automated compatibility sandboxes

Executive Summary

Run & revive legacy Linux apps with automated compatibility sandboxes

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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