Comment 2 for bug 1915878

I think the rationale here is insufficient to justify a removal.

> However, it appears that to the best of my knowledge all hardware
> vendors of SmartLink chips, modems, or whitelabel ODMs are all
> out of business at least as far back as 2005.

Lack of currently-produced hardware is not an argument for ceasing to support existing hardware which may still be in use. (This would not, for example, be a rationale for disabling any of the many drivers in the linux package for hardware that is no longer produced.)

> sl-modem also does not pass the cat-video test - it is unlikely that even
> if one has sl-modem working one can open Ubuntu and watch a cat
> video online.

I don't know what evidence you have to support this conclusion.

> sl-modem-daemon only builds on i386, and has no amd64 userspace support.

Yes, but the i386 package is still installable on amd64, so this doesn't seem to matter for users.

> the kernel driver is not upstream and thus requires constant patching
> by our kernel team to keep building.

"constant patching": there has been exactly one round of patching by the kernel team to fix a build failure, in 2019.

Note that this package was removed once before, but came back via Debian (bug #1650379).

If there were pointers to concrete evidence that this is a maintenance burden for the kernel team, I would accept that as a removal rationale.