The Importance of OS Backwards Compatibility

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."

Comments

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[wobblie]

Pick any random Linux distribution or *BSD and you will find many "30 year old programs"

Stop being stupid - most 16 bit windows software does NOT run on windows XP.

It is only hard for Windows.

[funwithBSD]

Solaris has backward compatable binaries back to 2.5. Any binary compiled on previous versions can be expected to run on a later OS.

VMS provides the same comptiblity through a byte level re-compiler, however crossed hardware platforms from VAX to ALPHA and now to INTEL.

wrong OS

[valwig]

How does Microsoft try so hard to be backwards compatible? It seems to me that they try to do the exact opposite, with version lock-in in programs like Word. OpenOffice can handle more versions of Word files than any version of Word ever could.

Pure FUD, Re:Backwards compatiblity

[twitter]

Unless your distro is 100% backwards compatible (ok, 90% compatible, there are always problems) back to, say... the 2.2 kernel many corporations won't take Linux seriously as a solution because the cost of debugging the problems that accompany each upgrade because of broken compatibility issues would be prohibitive.

But they take an OS with less than 70% seriously?

This is just more Vista bullshit, much like the "XP is solid" nonsense that came before the launch of XP. Everyone knows that the upgrade train forces everything in it's chain. Just a few days ago Ars Technica did a study on how sucky in place upgrades to Vista were. As a normal free software user, I almost never see version and upgrade problems with data. As a user of lots of old equipment and new software, I know free software offers much better support. How anyone can declare M$ a winner in any kind of compatibility contest is beyond me.

Re:Pure FUD, Re:Backwards compatiblity

[twitter]

I'd lake to know where you got that 70% figure from.

I can't put my finger on it but I remember 66% was a target. SP2 reduced the remainder by another 10%. The move to Vista promisses to be worse and is according to Ars Technica. If you are going to do a "clean" install, and Linux will do better.