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The Importance of OS Backwards Compatibility

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the keeping-the-past-alive dept.

gbjbaanb writes "Raymond Chen (of ancient Microsoft heritage) has a blog where he describes some of the things he's worked on, as well as oddments of obscure code and design decisions in Windows. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Windows, it is informative and often thought-provoking. Recently, Raymond posted an entry about backwards compatibility, and why it is such a big deal for large corporations. Something that I have read about on Slashdot regularly (where Windows is criticized for bothering with it at all), I thought readers would be interested in exactly why Microsoft spends so much effort on backwards compatibility, and by inference, why it is an important topic for getting Linux adopted by big business."

4 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Windows Backward Compat? by lymond01 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I put my CD in backwards and it worked just great in Windows. What needs some hard core journalistic investigation is Windows Upside-Down compatibility.

  2. Re:Windows Backward Compat? by LordSnooty · · Score: 3, Funny

    torrent plz

  3. Re:Omelette? by Monokeros · · Score: 4, Funny

    (+1 Yum.)

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  4. Re:With open source the same problem exists by Arker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not possible - no one supports that old version. If there are any important fixes (not just security, anything) they are always for the latest version. Open source people don't bother supporting older versions... ;-)

    Nonsense. Just use Debian.

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