With XP's End of Life, Munich Will Distribute Ubuntu CDs

SmartAboutThings writes "Windows XP is going to officially die and stop receiving support from Microsoft in April, 2014. After that very moment, it is said to become a gold mine for hackers all over the world who will exploit 'zero-day' vulnerabilities. The municipality of the German city of Munich wants to stop that from happening [and] has decided to distribute free CDs with Ubuntu 12.04 to users of the almost extinct XP. Munich, through its Gasteig Library, will prepare around 2000 CDs with Ubuntu 12.04 to offer to city residents affected by Windows XP's end of support. Previously, it was believed that Munich city's authorities were going to offer Lubuntu 12.04, which would have required lower system requirements with the same support period."

Comments

FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Weeee

Hmm...

[girlintraining]

to users of the almost extinct XP.

If by "almost extinct" you mean "Still installed on over half the computer in Asia," then sure. Bonus: It's still installed on over a third of machines worldwide I'm sure China will appreciate yet another American trying to meddle in their developing economy by giving them an operating system that no other major country would be expected to use as a replacement desktop, simply because we were nice enough to provide it free of charge. There's no possible way this do-good attempt to "save" the good people of another country... because as we all know, Western culture never tries to force other cultures to do what they want "for their own good".

Get a little international perspective, Slashdot. It's not like Microsoft practically gave away XP to developing countries to lock them in, and then jacked the price up for the upgrade, while giggling maniacally like some evil overlord. Jeez... why does the rest of the world hate imperialism so much? It's not like it ever enviously eyed their booming economy and thought; What can we do to cash in on this without looking like total dicks? Oh! I know... how about we pull support for their dominant operating system and force them to spend hundreds of millions on upgrade fees!

Snark aside, this disproportionately targets developing economies and non-western countries. Anywhere else, this would incite comments about racism, cultural warfare, etc., but since it's just an innocent tech giant all I've heard is crickets. Put yourself in the shoes of the rest of the world though; They have aging computers that can't run Windows 7 because of the significantly higher hardware requirements, and while they produce most of that hardware, they can't buy it because their workers all make pennies on the dollar. Are these people just going to drop off the internet, crawl down a dark hole, and die as a service to the rest of us, who hate the poor in the third world? Probably not: Instead, they'll form the backbone of supermassive new botnets, without any way to secure those systems, it'll become a cesspool of all manner of digital evil.

But at least Microsoft's profit margins will be up, so there is that.