Should Microsoft Be Required To Extend Support For Windows XP?

An anonymous reader writes "If Windows XP were a photocopier, Microsoft would have a duty to deal with competitors who sought to provide aftermarket support. A new article in the Michigan Law Review argues that Microsoft should be held to the same duty, and should be legally obligated to help competitors who wish to continue to provide security updates for the aging operating system, even if that means allowing them to access and use Windows XP's sourcecode."

Comments

Where do you draw the line?

[glasshole]

Photocopier vendors do not open the controller software up to competitors / vendors who provide support. They just give them specs for replacement parts. Do you force Apple to let 'competitors' support OS X 10.5 on G5 Macs? Do you force Google to let competitors still support Google Wave?

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[flux]

Actually Google already gave the Wave to the Apache foundation, so I guess they're set from that point of view.

That aside, I don't think a company should be forced to provide any level of support for a ten-year-old product. They could even be up-front about ("this product will not be supported for longer than five years") and people still wouldn't care. Well, until the day came.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[phantomfive]

I can tell you, I would have been happy if Apple had open sourced their Rosetta support. It would have been nice if they'd open sourced their Classic support. They could have released carbon as an open source project. Instead those things just disappeared, you can't even buy them.

Of course, legally they are not required to support those things now, but I would favor a law change that would require it.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[tlambert]

Photocopier vendors do not open the controller software up to competitors / vendors who provide support. They just give them specs for replacement parts.

Do you force Apple to let 'competitors' support OS X 10.5 on G5 Macs? Do you force Google to let competitors still support Google Wave?

The paper (if you read it) claims that the requirement should be enforced based on the Microsoft having monopolistic power in the marketplace. Apple doesn't wield monopolistic power in the marketplace for desktop operating systems.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[Anonymous Coward]

More barriers to entry? I guess it'll be good for the lawyers.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[ShieldW0lf]

I don't think so. Full disclosure should limit liability and increase our satisfaction with our merchandise. Happy people have no need for lawyers.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[Opportunist]

No, but if there was a market for T1 spare parts, someone would come and open a business that deals with just that. That is the whole point of the whole thread!

Who decides when the "end of life" of a product is reached? Its maker, or its user? Who decides when an item has outlived its usefulness, its maker or its user? Who the fuck is MS to tell me what I think is still usable and what is not?

The point here is that if XP was a car, you could rest assured that even if MS decided to discontinue offering spare parts, the market of people who still want to use it is SO big that businesses would be popping up left and right pumping out spare parts for it.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[Opportunist]

Oh c'mon, you know how it would work in this time and age. If some blunder in MS software caused a nuclear meltdown, MS would be declared too big to fail and you can shove your damage claims where the sun doesn't shine.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[qwijibo]

With software, and by extension the hardware it requires, the lifespan is incredibly short compared with almost every other product out there. I'd like to see more companies release the software, code, etc. to the public domain as a formal way of walking away from it, but leaving customers with something more than "gee, must suck to be you" for support.

Borland released old versions of tools like Turbo C when it was no longer relevant commercially. Even though I paid for those tools when they were commercially relevant, I always liked the spirit of giving away old software. There's no cost to releasing it to the public domain. There are plenty of third world countries learning on and using technology that we throw away. There's a benefit to those people having software and learning technology but there's absolutely no money in it.

There are fringe cases where ongoing support is needed for really old systems. For example, I've been in machine shops with computers that drive CNC machines that run on 386's under DOS. As long as the machines keep working, it's a valuable part of running their business. Today it's nearly impossible to find replacement parts, but smarter shop owners bought extra pieces when they were disappearing from the market long ago. If something breaks, these people are willing to pay a premium to people who can help them. They know it's not a great situation, but it's much better than spending hundreds of thousands to replace everything that depends on old systems.

Proprietary interfaces, boards and drivers that integrate machinery with computers are the legacy components that makes it hard to replace these old systems. If they used an RS232 interface for low bandwidth data and Ethernet for higher bandwidth, it wouldn't be hard to reverse engineer what's going on and write software that runs on modern systems that could serve as a replacement. But a proprietary interface that requires an ISA slot and custom cables means there is no way to modernize that doesn't require new custom hardware.

The space shuttle is another good example of what happens when something is decades into its service life, but has components that were never expected to live that long. NASA can't just load everything on an iPad and hope each crew member bringing their own is enough fault tolerance and stands up to the extreme environment of space.

XP isn't all that old, as evidenced by the number of users who don't want to get off of it. It makes sense that Microsoft wants to get rid of it - there's no price for a support contract that would make it mutually beneficial to keep tech support trained on it and developers dedicated to working on it. But at the same time, Microsoft is not the kind of company that is likely to release it to the public domain either. The last thing they would want is an open source community picking it up, keeping it current with security patches and making it work on new hardware. That's the antithesis of the forced upgrade model.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[will_die]

Microsoft has been really clear on their end of life policy for probably a decade if not more. The only way to say they have not is if you say all those increases in time they have given are an indication of unclearness.
However with your definition of $100 USD, cost to upgrade OS from XP to Windows 7, as being "an arm and a leg" not to sure about the rest you wrote.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[qwijibo]

That may be a good idea for things like medical or aviation related devices where people can die if they fail. There are regulations in these fields for exactly this reason, and that's why it's such an expensive and long, drawn out process to bring new products to markets in highly regulated industries like these.

However, putting that burden on every industry would just move all technology jobs to countries without such regulations. Then what would you do to stop people from buying crappy, poorly supported products from those countries? Moving production doesn't help solve the underlying problem.

For software, it should be sufficient for them to release the code and let someone else take over the market they've given up on. Culturally, we only recognize the profit oriented side of business, and ignore the benefit to society that could come with allowing that intellectual property to go into the public domain once it's no longer commercially viable.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[TheRaven64]

Apple would have continued to ship Rosetta, but IBM bought Transitive (from whom it was licensed) and was still annoyed at the publicity that Apple had given them in the switch from PowerPC to Intel, so decided to return the favour and refused to license Rosetta for a new version of OS X. Apple tried to spin this in a positive way ('look how hip we are, stopping supporting that old crap!') but it didn't really work.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[gnasher719]

Oh c'mon, you know how it would work in this time and age. If some blunder in MS software caused a nuclear meltdown, MS would be declared too big to fail and you can shove your damage claims where the sun doesn't shine.

If you use MS software (or anyone else's software) in a situation where it could cause a nuclear meltdown, you are using it against Microsoft's explicit terms and conditions, so they wouldn't be at fault at all.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[negablade]

I don't know of a car flaw that can tank an economy, cause a nuclear disaster or cause oil to spill out into the sea. But a software flaw can do all these things.

Let me think...An army truck is secretly transporting a nuclear device through downtown New York. A random pothole bounces the truck and jars the device, accidentally changing it to armed status, while also tearing the break cables. The truck loses control and crashes into the Wall Street Stock Exchange. The armed and unstable nuclear device detonates wiping out the financial district, crippling the US economy in the nuclear disaster. The skipper of an oil supertanker is blinded by the detonation flash and crashes into Manhattan island, tearing the hull and spilling 2million barrels of oil into New York harbor.

No single software bug can do all those things either. Most bugs only end up with someone swearing at the computer while they reboot. Quite often it's the human in the control loop doing something unexpected that leads to failure of mission critical systems.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[Kaenneth]

The disasters caused by Y2K were so quickly forgotten...

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[mrchaotica]

Mod parent -1, megacorp shill. Disclosure of the manufacturing process is the opposite of a barrier to entry!

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[NapalmV]

If I were come up with a novel process of coming up with a unique looking decorative candle that made me distinctly different from my competitors and gave me a competitive advantage, I would be required to publicly disclose it for everyone to see, including my competitors and would immediately lose any advantage I had.

This is what "patents" were originally intended for. To allow public disclosure of the new manufacturing process without losing the competitive advantage.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[dcw3]

I don't know of a car flaw that can tank an economy, cause a nuclear disaster or cause oil to spill out into the sea. But a software flaw can do all these things.

If your company is in a mission critical business, running unsupported software like this, then someone's head should roll. It's not the products fault, and it's not like there aren't other options. If you want a product to supply the things you're requiring, you shouldn't expect to get it out of a tiny box at Best Buy.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[BUL2294]

XP was legally sold on netbooks made as late as October 22, 2010 ( http://windows.microsoft.com/e... ). Those computers were still in the sales pipeline into early 2011.

Re:Where do you draw the line?

[mrchaotica]

My cars are 16 and 18 years old with about 200K miles each, and are still worth fixing.

One of them, a 1998 VW Beetle TDI, has exactly the same safety rating as one built as recently as 2011 (because it's the same unibody!), gets better fuel economy than a 2014, and pollutes less (except for particulates) because the older engine technology can use 100% biodiesel while the new one can't.

The other one is a 1996 4-cylinder Ford Ranger that gets better (or at least equal) fuel economy to any new (or newish) truck. (I tried to find the most efficient new 4x4 trucks to compare against; if you find any that are better let me know!) It admittedly is probably marginally less safe and marginally more polluting than a new truck, but not enough to be worth the 10x difference in cost!

Nah just have copyright last for 14 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah just have copyright last for 14 years max.

Then Microsoft will have to actually build stuff significantly better than XP rather than disappointing stuff like Windows 8.

You think progress would be slow because the shortened/reduced monopolies would reduce investment into innovation? Well Microsoft has spent billions and what we got is stuff like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

A shorter copyright term would definitely "help them focus" on innovating rather than extending or leveraging the reach of their existing monopolies don't you think?

Re:Nah just have copyright last for 14 years

[Opportunist]

Shorter copyright would actually not hinder but force innovation to happen. Right now, you can invent something and if it turns out to be "gold", you can milk it forever. No need whatsoever to ever invent anything again.

That's supposed to spur innovation? Could someone show me how?

Re:Nah just have copyright last for 14 years

[Camael]

Right now, you can invent something and if it turns out to be "gold", you can milk it forever. ...That's supposed to spur innovation? Could someone show me how?

I agree with you, and its not. Copyright extension was a blatant cash grab engineered by a corrupt legislature to rob the public through the Mickey Mouse Act .

I suppose we should be thankful there is a limit of any kind. Actual quote :-

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution.

Re:Nah just have copyright last for 14 years

[FlyHelicopters]

The copyright running out on XP wouldn't solve the problem of a lack of support.

It also brings into question, which version of XP? Is XP SP2 a "new work" and thus an extension of copyright? Or is SP1 out of copyright but SP2 is not?

What a horrible situation, you could legally make copies of the original release of XP, but not install any service packs or updates.

Yea, THAT would be good for the Internet. :)

Re:Nah just have copyright last for 14 years

[ShieldW0lf]

"The Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that expanded access to the incorporation of joint-stock companies.

Before the Act, incorporation was possible only by royal charter or private bill and was limited owing to Parliament's jealous protection of the privileges and advantages thereby granted."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

Prior to this Act, companies were governed by the Bubble Act of 1720. They had a charter given to them by the nation. They earned profits, ridiculous profits, but they were a governmental entity responsible for enriching the nation at the expense of other nations, in the same way that a non-profit earns profits but reinvests them in the pursuit of the company charter rather than paying out to shareholders. This was the time of Mercantilism, not Capitalism.

In the USA, forming each individual corporation required a separate act of legislation until New Jersey adopted an "enabling" corporate law, with the goal of attracting more business to the state in 1896. Citizens governed corporations by detailing operating conditions not just in charters but also in state constitutions and state laws. Incorporated businesses were prohibited from taking any action that legislators did not specifically allow. States also limited corporate charters to a set number of years. And, if you broke the rules, you didn't get a fine, the company had its charter revoked.

In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court tried to strip states of this power by overruling a lower court’s decision that allowed New Hampshire to revoke a charter granted to Dartmouth College by King George III. This was done on the basis that the charter was a contract between the King and the College, and that it violated the Constitution to pass laws to invalidate a contract. The US was no longer a part of the Commonwealth at this time, but that was deemed non-relevant to the contract.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

That decision was the beginning of the modern corporation. This was when they moved beyond the control of democratic processes, were relieved of any duty to serve humanity and became all about contracts and shareholders and their duty became empowering the shareholders above all other concerns.

no.

[globaljustin]

I am a critic of M$ but I do not think they should be required by law.

Only in the case of some sort of long-term contract that is still in effect, that mentions specifically updating software until a time in the future...unless that is the case.

These laws are complex and the photocopier example is interesting.

I am against artificial scarcity for sure...that's one reason I hate M$...but I think this may cross the line. If M$ wants to let XP die then they have the right to refuse to make vital trade secret info available to people who want to keep it alive.

I have a feeling the photocopier example is more about purposefully creating artificial scarcity. It's not quite analogous b/c it's an actual machine not software.

I'm not giving M$ a pass. Its about property rights. If people love XP so much (i remember it was the only windows version i could really get work done using...would still choose it today) then the community will come up with a solution...which should be legal to give away for free.

Re:no.

[phantomfive]

If M$ wants to let XP die then they have the right to refuse to make vital trade secret info available to people who want to keep it alive.

Hard for me to believe there's any vital trade secret info in Windows

Re:no.

[tlambert]

I am a critic of M$ but I do not think they should be required by law.

Only in the case of some sort of long-term contract that is still in effect, that mentions specifically updating software until a time in the future...unless that is the case.

These laws are complex and the photocopier example is interesting.

A potentially more interesting example is replacement auto parts, which automobile manufacturers are required by law to stock for 10 years after the last date of manufacture so that owners of the vehicles can repair them or have them repaired by a third party. Since the last ship date for Windows XP was the last contractual date that Microsoft allowed vendors to bundle it with new computers, that would give them about an 8 year support requirement for "replacement parts". Note that the automobile example would apply to the GM ignition switch, which had an engineering change to correct a design defect - and any security flaw is technically a design defect.

I think that the more companies attempt to treat intellectual property as real property, the more that the negative aspects of real property law should be applied to their products.

E.g. if I use your patent, and you don't stop me using it, then I've engaged in adverse possession, and have "established an interest" in the intellectual property which you must therefore allow me to continue to use, just as if my driveway had been over the property line for 10 years, and you didn't do anything about it, or if I'd been parking my car at your curb, and it didn't bother you until I started parking my RV there and blocking your view.

The paper's argument seems to be along similar lines of thinking.

Re:no.

[sjames]

An interesting angle though, MS is in the process of officially declaring that they have no further commercial interest in XP whatsoever. They won't sell you a license even if you beg them. It's a little hard to call it 'valuable intellectual property' with a strait face when they refuse to derive any value from it.

Not really sure how much to make of that, just throwing it out there.

Re:No.

[Opportunist]

The problem is, exactly, that it's getting harder and harder to justify upgrading your OS. It worked up to XP, but from there on ... but let's take a look down the MS OS timeline.

3.11 -> 95. A no brainer. 95 was leaps and bounds ahead of 3.11, which was at best a GUI to DOS.
95 -> 98. Finally networking that really works and doesn't need you to resort so some kind of third party tool to actually USE your network.
98 -> 98SE. Stability increase, far, far better support for various bits of hardware.
98SE -> ME. Erh... Well, let's be honest here, there were some ... hey look, is that George Clooney?
98SE -> 2k. The compatibility of the 9x line combined with the stability and the security from the NT line.
2k -> XP. Where 2k was "a business system that got some touch from a private user system", XP was where the private user became home again. 2k was a bit sterile, XP now offered everything they needed. Much better USB support, WLan out of the box, a much smoother user experience altogether and near perfect stability (outside of driver woes).

And that's where the "must have OSs" end, pretty much, from Joe Randomuser's point of view. He needed 95 for "true" 32bit stuff. He needed 98(SE) for easily working networking. He needed 2k for complete USB support. He needed XP for WLan support. But what would he need Vista/7/8 for? Nothing he could possibly want to plug into his computer has a problem with XP. Nothing he could want to run has an intrinsic problem with XP (yes, some newer games want a DX version that MS deliberately did not make available for XP).

What will in the near future possibly convince people to move away from XP and towards 7 or 8 (or, probably, by the time it really matters, 9) is 64bit support, something that didn't really work out well for XP, and about the only thing where I can say with a straight face that 7 trumps XP in every way, from OS itself to drivers. But to most "normal" users, a limit of 3.something GB isn't that big a deal, considering that most of the software they'd want to run is suffering from exactly the same problem, since it's 32bit soft.

Re:no.

[Anonymous Coward]

So here is your big wake-up call. If you don't do something about the future guess what is gonna happen?

The big wake up call is that anybody not willing to continue to provide full support to a 13 year old OS version should be avoided? Got it. Now checking current official Apple support for Mac OS 9.2..., and commercial Linux distro support, bug and security fixes for their 2.4.0 kernel based releases.

Re:No.

[FlyHelicopters]

7 is a nice upgrade over XP, if you don't see or understand that, I'm not sure what I can say, 5 years on, that will help you understand.

Besides proper 64 bit support, the seamless way it installs and updates drivers and software for almost anything you plug into it is vastly improved over XP.

XP still wants a floppy disk for drivers needed during install, it was developed in another time, the world has moved on.

I have played with 8, it doesn't do enough over 7 to make the upgrade worthwhile for me, but I suspect 9 will when it comes.

Re:No.

[FaxeTheCat]

I'd be surprised if much has changed beyond the shell

There must be a reason why so much XP based software apparently does not work on Win 7/8?

Depends

[fredprado]

Microsoft or any software company should be forced to provide full support for their commercial products for as long as they hold copyright over them.

Re:Depends

[hawguy]

I like this concept.

However, it would probably drive the companies bankrupt.

(Imagine supporting win 3.1, win 98, win me, win nt, win vista, win xp, win 7, and win 8 all at the same time because they share copyrighted code.

Well, they could sign away the copyright and release the source code for any software they no longer want to support.

Re:Depends

[Cenan]

Relinquish copyright on the product and the problem is solved. Release the source and there is no problem.

Re:Depends

[sjames]

All they have to do is formally release the source into the public domain. That would end their obligation.

Re:Depends

[Kaenneth]

Because no new exploits that require immediate patches, with no central authority to distribute said patches, would be found in that released source code...

Re:Depends

[fredprado]

At your orders, my good sir. Copyright is an artificial restriction imposed by the government to protect the developer. It has its reasons to be, but like all rules imposed by law a balance should be met between the good and the harm it does.

Copyright was never meant to be used as a means to make a product or service unavailable. Quite the opposite. If a company decides to sabotage their own product by either refusing to sell it, making it prohibitively expensive or denying support and forbidding others from providing this support it should lose this right.

An Alternative Law

[l0ungeb0y]

Personally, I think they are going about this the wrong way. The Gov't should be sending Death Squads to kill all members of any household still running XP, or running any version of IE less than 10. Brutal? Maybe. But, boy will it do wonders for the social lives of us Web Developers.

Re:An Alternative Law

[hawguy]

Personally, I think they are going about this the wrong way. The Gov't should be sending Death Squads to kill all members of any household still running XP, or running any version of IE less than 10. Brutal? Maybe. But, boy will it do wonders for the social lives of us Web Developers.

Of course, it would also put a lot of web designers out of a job if they no longer need to spend hours working around quirks in older browsers, so be careful what you ask for.

Re:An Alternative Law

[Richard_at_work]

We still have to work around issues in newer browsers, and not just IE either :(

Wake up and succeed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a damn business opportunity for anyone with business sense.

No

[scream at the sky]

It's 12 years old for crying out loud, let it die.

That's like arguing that Nokia should still be providing support and software upgrades for the 6100.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Re:No

[Opportunist]

You can actually still get parts for old Nokia phones. Not from Nokia, of course...

Microsoft still provide support for Windows XP

[FaxeTheCat]

The case is based on false assumptions.
Microsoft still provide support for Windows XP to those who are willig to pay for it: http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Case closed.

Re:Microsoft still provide support for Windows XP

[FaxeTheCat]

If she is willing to pay a nominal fee, why not spend that money to upgrade the OS? After all, it seems that you are willing to help move her to Linux (which is not a bad idea), so I guess you could also help her upgrade to Win7 or Win8.1?

Re:Microsoft still provide support for Windows XP

[Kaenneth]

Sadly, I have a high dpi document scanner for which driver support ended with XP.

My TV tuner cards also only worked up through XP, but they have no analog signals to receive now anyway; except I'd like to use them to digitize old VHS tapes.

Re:Microsoft still provide support for Windows XP

[Kaenneth]

4,294,967K should be enough for anybody.

Linux needs to step up

[Barlo_Mung_42]

MS is trying to push people off XP. There are other alternatives after all. Many of them are even free. How bad does it make Linux and Chrome look if they can't compete with an 12+ year old OS that MS is actively trying to push people off of?

What do the contracts say?

[jcr]

Microsoft should provide support for Windows XP if, and ONLY if they have a contractual obligation to do so, or they find it economically beneficial to their shareholders to continue this support. If neither are true, then they shouldn't.

-jcr

Define Support

[enter to exit]

You'll need to define what support means.They could provide support by turning your xp install into win7 with a xp boot screen. They won't necessarily provide the kind of support you want

No Linux distro provides decades of support either, you're just upgraded to the latest packages and that might as easily break things in the same way xp to win7 might.

Complete access and indefinite support for free?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

it's a pretty easy barrier if enforced on _everyone_.

Supporting consumer grade software that is sold for ~$100 a time indefinitely, including providing full internal technical details to arbitrary additional parties, is a "pretty easy barrier"? I'm sorry, but that is absurd.

There are people in this discussion suggesting that someone who doesn't want to comply with such rules can go **** themselves and just give up on entering the US market. Well, guess what? They probably would. The burden imposed by this kind of requirement would almost certainly be prohibitive in cost. A vendor such as Microsoft would therefore do better to sacrifice the entire US market if it meant avoiding both an eternal unfunded mandate to support everything they ever sold and giving up their trade secrets to all their competitors.

There are also people in this discussion pointing out that other industries, such as automotive manufacture, involve a much higher level of safety standards and engineering approval. That is true, but cars typically cost 2-4 orders of magnitude more than commercial off-the-shelf software products, and they have working lifetimes that are probably shorter than Windows XP's 12+ years in many cases. Moreover, the auto manufacturers still aren't required to disclose the keys to the kingdom to the degree that is suggested here.

I'm all for developing good quality software, and if you're running a long-term software business then I think providing a reasonable degree of free-of-charge support to your existing customers is probably a good investment. But providing heavyweight support has a large cost, so unless you as a customer are willing either to regulate the industry and pay N times as much for your software purchases up-front or to pay the true cost of ongoing support via proper support contracts, I don't think it's realistic to expect that vendors will just cover that cost indefinitely out of their own pockets.

In fact, in the entire history of software development, that has almost never happened. Apple have released the first version of OS X around the same time as Microsoft released Windows XP, yet Apple have aggressively promoted numerous upgrades, most of which cost a significant amount of money, since that time, and somehow I suspect you'd have trouble getting full support for an original OS X system today. And to put this all in perspective Open Source darlings like Mozilla Firefox have "long term support" releases with lifetimes measured in months, not years. It's actually remarkable that Microsoft have offered free support to Windows XP for as long as they have, despite releasing not one but three successor generations of the product during that period.

WGA?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

i remember when XP was released and WGA ( or it's predecessor ) was new and people were worried that MS would shutdown their servers and make it impossible to reinstall in some cases.

MS promised that they would release a key or some sort of patch that would allow you to install without the server.

Where is it?

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[cmdr_tofu]

Honestly if there were barriers to creating a semi-monopolistic software monoculture, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing.

But two swing out of the realm of opinion, you compare Windows XP to "OpenSource darlings like firefox" whose long-term support is measured in "months, not years". This is a bad comparison. A better comparison would be Ubuntu LTS which includes firefox and whose support is measured in years not months. However Canonical having only a fraction of a percent of the marketshare that Windows XP does, is not making a business model in supporting releases for over 14 years.

The key difference is any independent software vendor can with a very low barrier to entry. At my previous employer we had production software stack (purchased from a company) which dependent on Redhat 7.3 (not RHEL 7), but you know the one with 2.4 kernel from the 90s. Of course it was impossible to get updates from Redhat, but I made the vendor provide tested procedures for upgrading zlib and openssh and it was possible for them to do this.

I think it would be a great idea to require Microsoft to "open up" even if it was outside of their interests. Hell if Windows 8 could not compete with community supported open source XP, it still means that people get better software :)

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[Antique Geekmeister]

> IMO the "right" thing to do is either release the source or provide full API and file format specs.

Microsoft has a very poor history of providing API's. Examine the history of the "OOXML" API, which was broken from its publication and has never been actually followed by Microsoft Office products. Or look into the Samba and EU lawsuits against Microsoft, mentioned at http://www.linuxinsider.com/st.... The original specifications that Microsoft provided were _horrible_, and quite useless. And they're still patent burdened, which can block third party developers from being able to safely update such products.

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But two swing out of the realm of opinion, you compare Windows XP to "OpenSource darlings like firefox" whose long-term support is measured in "months, not years". This is a bad comparison.

Fair enough, though it wasn't really meant as a direct comparison, more an illustration of how much effort is required to support old software for extended periods.

A better comparison would be Ubuntu LTS which includes firefox and whose support is measured in years not months.

It is. In fact, the period is now five years for both desktop and server versions.

Again, just to put that in perspective, Windows 7 (two generations after Windows XP) was released around 4.5 years ago.

I think it would be a great idea to require Microsoft to "open up" even if it was outside of their interests. Hell if Windows 8 could not compete with community supported open source XP, it still means that people get better software :)

Well, it would be great, in the short term, for everyone except Microsoft. But who is going to build the next software product that is so successful that almost everyone uses it for nearly a decade in that world?

Doesn't have to be free

[sjbe]

Supporting consumer grade software that is sold for ~$100 a time indefinitely, including providing full internal technical details to arbitrary additional parties, is a "pretty easy barrier"? I'm sorry, but that is absurd.

Microsoft does NOT have to support it indefinitely for free. However there is precisely zero obstacle to them supporting XP on an ongoing basis for a reasonable sum for those interested in paying for such support. Something like $50/year (times a few million users) should more than adequately cover the cost and provide Microsoft a reasonable profit. Microsoft could provide paid support AND make the upgrade path easier by doing so. However Microsoft has chosen to burn that bridge instead in an effort to force people to "upgrade" to software that they clearly are not interested in buying. Since they have elected to go down that route instead of providing paid support, it is reasonable that people are calling for alternatives including open sourcing it. I think a more pragmatic approach would be to sell the supporting XP business to a third party. But if all Microsoft is going to do is take their ball and go home then they can kiss my shiny metal ass.

Bear in mind that aside from security patches, Microsoft essentially provides ZERO support to most users of XP anyway. Not like I can call them up and get questions answered. Claims that continuing to support XP would be some enormous financial burden on the company are pretty absurd.

Moreover, the auto manufacturers still aren't required to disclose the keys to the kingdom to the degree that is suggested here.

Not really true. Almost everything worth protecting product-wise in the auto industry is patented so it is inaccurate to say they haven't disclosed the details. A company like GM could easily make a soup-to-nuts replica of a Toyota if they wanted to. There isn't much technology that is a big secret or that cannot be reverse engineered and the companies that supply it usually supply multiple firms. Software is VERY different than auto manufacturing though software is becoming a bigger piece of the industry as time goes on. (and yes I'm an engineer who has worked in the auto industry for years) The differences between auto companies are mostly in how they are structured and managed. The differences between the products themselves are fairly minor. Most auto companies (like GM and Ford) have supply chains that heavily overlap. An axle for Ford is very likely made in the same plant as an axle for GM and surprisingly often is engineered by many of the same people. My company assembles parts that go into a GM SUV and every component in that assembly we make can be purchased directly by you if you wanted to. (you'd just pay a LOT more than we do)

Re:Doesn't have to be free

[Zmobie]

Bear in mind that aside from security patches, Microsoft essentially provides ZERO support to most users of XP anyway. Not like I can call them up and get questions answered. Claims that continuing to support XP would be some enormous financial burden on the company are pretty absurd.

You CLEARLY do not understand how time consuming and costly it is for a company to provide even basic patches for a piece of software. On SMALL SCALE application my company has deployed it is costly to have even one developer have to do this repeatedly (I know because for one of our system I am this guy...). Having repeated interuptions for support calls, entire sets of days that have to be blocked off to patch some bullshit, and a sales department breathing down my neck because the longer this goes on the worse it looks on the company. All the while the 3 other projects I was working on (as the damn lead at that) are getting behind and it is my ass to catch them up.

It IS an enourmous financial burden, especially when they have to invest in researching the security vulnerabilities because if one is discovered and exploited before they patch it hits them in the court of public opinion (and their sales directly). Upgrading is expensive, yes everyone knows this, but guess what, this happens with every other consumer product on the market today. It is unreasonable for people to expect software companies to do it indefinitely FOR FREE. Even if they could do it with a paid service, they do still have the right to refuse service. Normally I am all for the consumer over the business (because most businesses are cut-throat douches), but what people expect with Windows XP is just insane and they don't apply basic sense to their arguments.

Re:Doesn't have to be free

[sjbe]

You CLEARLY do not understand how time consuming and costly it is for a company to provide even basic patches for a piece of software.

Really? I'm an accountant and an engineer. I've done a fair bit of programming professionally and I'm pretty sure I've got a better handle on the actual costs involved than most of the people reading this.

. Having repeated interuptions for support calls, entire sets of days that have to be blocked off to patch some bullshit, and a sales department breathing down my neck because the longer this goes on the worse it looks on the company.

None of which is relevant here. Microsoft does not provide support calls unless you are a REALLY big customer and they would be paying for the priviledge. They have people whose entire job is to "patch some bullshit". There is no sales department breathing down anyone's neck regarding XP. The only thing they have to do is fund some staff to patch bugs and keep the infrastructure going. They can even charge for the cost of it.

It IS an enourmous financial burden, especially when they have to invest in researching the security vulnerabilities because if one is discovered and exploited before they patch it hits them in the court of public opinion (and their sales directly)

As I said earlier, I'm an accountant so bear that in mind before you go claiming that it is some enormous financial burden. Fact is that you can look at ANY software company (including Microsoft) and the cost of engineering which includes all of this bug squashing accounts for somewhere between 10%-15% of their costs. You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at their financial statements. The VAST majority of cost for Microsoft is in Sales, Marketing and Administration. Their engineering and "support" costs are significant but given that their NET profit margin is somewhere around 25%, supporting XP isn't exactly killing them financially.

No, Microsoft decided to not give people a path to continue using XP in the hopes that they would be forced to "upgrade". It's a money grab. Nothing more.

Re:Difficult decision.

[bloodhawk]

OS/2 was withdrawn from sale and ended support in 2006.

"Nice upgade"? For who?

[sjbe]

7 is a nice upgrade over XP, if you don't see or understand that, I'm not sure what I can say, 5 years on, that will help you understand.

If you say so. I'm typing this on a Windows 7 machine and running my older XP machine in a virtual machine. Frankly Windows 7 does not have a single feature I need that I did not have with XP. NOT ONE. I know I am not alone either. I'm sure it's better here and there under the hood but frankly not in any way that was causing me problems. Plus it requires a much faster machine to accomplish the same tasks I already could do.

Besides proper 64 bit support, the seamless way it installs and updates drivers and software for almost anything you plug into it is vastly improved over XP.

64 bit doesn't provide me any noticeable benefit as an end user that I can discern and Windows 7 does not handle drivers any more gracefully for me than XP does. I still have to download and install a googly percentage of my drivers and software manually and it doesn't update them any more effectively either. I'm sure you can find some cases where that is not true but whatever differences there are are so small as to be trivial for most of us.

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[ShieldW0lf]

Your position is really out there, you know that?

Cars cost more because they are naturally scarce. Every one you make takes time and effort and resources.

Once software is made, it is trivial to make enough for everyone. Every person who could be advantaged by it but isn't is another example of waste and inefficiency.

If you can sit in a room, look at your creation, destroy its capacity to enrich the human experience just out of a spiteful desire to render it scarce when it doesn't have to be, and not be wracked with guilt at what you've done... frankly, you're a monster and have no fucking soul.

No one is suggesting that Microsoft should be compelled to do anything they don't want to do. If they don't want to support it, they don't have to. Just let them do it themselves.

I used to have a No Fear shirt when I was younger that said "Lead, Follow, or Get The Fuck Out Of The Way".

Microsoft and everyone else who uses "Intellectual Property" laws in their business is guilty of the greatest possible sin. They stand in the way of people helping themselves.

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[VGPowerlord]

But two swing out of the realm of opinion, you compare Windows XP to "OpenSource darlings like firefox" whose long-term support is measured in "months, not years". This is a bad comparison. A better comparison would be Ubuntu LTS which includes firefox and whose support is measured in years not months. However Canonical having only a fraction of a percent of the marketshare that Windows XP does, is not making a business model in supporting releases for over 14 years.

As a direct comparison, Windows XP is OVER TWELVE YEARS OLD now and has not one, not even two, but three major versions newer available to the public. In Ubuntu terms, Windows XP is the equivalent of Ubuntu 06.04 LTS (12.04 being the current LTS as 14.04 has yet to be released) and should be treated accordingly.

Windows XP is a version of Windows

[indigozero]

Windows XP is a version of Windows which Microsoft still fully supports. There are explicit upgrade paths to supported versions of the product. The fallacy is that a lot discussion implies that Windows XP is not a version of the Windows Product line. The real question that should be being raised is how long should Microsoft support an older version of their Software? Personally, I don't think something that is over a decade old and has gone through more than three major versions should be required to be supported. It's time to upgrade already or deal with technical stagnation.

Re:Even more importantly...

[ebh]

"3.0L, direct-injected 305bhp V-6, Mini-ATX form factor"

Re:Complete access and indefinite support for free

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

to support they could simply release their internal documentation, source code, diagrams etc. to the public

That isn't a simple matter at all if you're still developing new versions of your product based on the same materials. You are proposing that a business whose primary asset is its collective knowledge should be required to give away the most important knowledge it has accumulated, at great cost, up to a certain point, just to absolve it of a hypothetical liability that it was never realistic to assign to that business in the first place.

That would be a fair compromise considering that IT is one of the very few industries that get away with delivering faulty, unstable and insecure products as the accepted norm. If houses or clothes or refrigerators were produced like software...

...then a lot of houses would need expensive repairs after a few years to fix damage caused by subsidence, pests, unanticipated weather conditions, or the neighbours causing damage while doing work on their own property, while cheap clothes would be some of the most frequently returned items in stores because they fall apart after they've hardly been worn due to economising on manufacturing techniques and materials?

People talk a lot about how software is unreliable and breaks all the time, but the reality is that most consumer software is remarkably resilient given the many and varied jobs it needs to do and the cost of making it. I'm writing this on a Windows 7 PC that I've had for several years. I can count on my fingers the total number of times Windows has fallen over, and as far as I know all of them were actually caused by either a hardware failure or a dodgy update to some additional system software like a device driver or security tool, not by Windows itself. Sure, some software isn't up to scratch and the people who make it deserve to be criticised, but I don't think it's fair to claim that software in general is some sort of unusable, bug-ridden mess.

why mess with a good thing?

[stenvar]

Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot by discontinuing XP because so many devices rely on it. And the market is reacting with a move to Linux. Companies who bet too heavily on Microsoft and Windows XP, i.e., companies run by stupid people, are losing big time. That's the way markets are supposed to work.

If the government intervenes, it will do three things: it will perpetuate a lousy operating system, it would prop up Microsoft's desktop OS position a little longer, and it would prevent companies that made stupid beds on Microsoft's proprietary software from suffering the consequences of their poor choices. I don't see any compelling public interest in any of that.

Enough excuses already

[dave562]

If people put as much effort into getting off of XP as they spend fighting the inevitable, they would not be facing these challenges right now. Microsoft has made it quite clear that they are going to sunset the product. There have been newer, better operating systems released that provide an easy upgrade path. Unless someone is running a single core processor, Windows 7 is faster and more stable than XP.

And if the newer Microsoft OSes are sooooo terrible, "There is always Linux." (Or OSX)

These "Save XP" articles are tired and played out. Move on guys. When I read these articles, all I hear is, "Whaaaaaaa. I have procrastinated for the last five years and now I'm fucked. Save me from my own ineptitude!!!"

For a community focused on OSS and Linux. For a community that has consumed Lord only knows how many terabytes of storage bashing XP and touting the glories of ANYTHING ELSE. For a community like that, one would think that XP going EOL would be celebrated with much merriment and significant rejoicing. Oddly enough, it seems that one would be wrong.

virtual solution (at least in part)

[callmetheraven]

The fact that MS chooses not to include a fully-functional XP virtual machine in each and every copy of win8 is obnoxious and borderline criminal. Smells like a decision that fat faggot Ballmer would have made.

I realize that even this would not solve all the antique XP problems, but it would solve the majority.

(offtopic) I often imagine the goodwill that MS would generate if they offered all Win8 users a free "downgrade" to win7. Add to this the aforementioned VM and I think even slashdotters might say nice things about them.

Re:virtual solution (at least in part)

[jbolden]

They included Windows XP mode in Windows 7. Windows 7 upgrades are still for sale. Windows 8 includes a Hypervisor which will run licensed XP just fine.

I often imagine the goodwill that MS would generate if they offered all Win8 users a free "downgrade" to win7.

They have good strategic reasons to move their conservative customer base to Windows 8. I wish if anything they were more aggressive.

Long live the dot matrix

[DoctorFuji]

I want some more ribbon for my dot matrix printer

It's funny guys...

[MugenEJ8]

For a buncha people adamantly against Windows, there sure are a lot of people out here explaining how Microsoft should extend support for an obsolete product.

It's obsolete and dangerous to your business/personal life, like lead paint and asbestos. Please upgrade to something modern and stop moaning.

No.

[Red_Chaos1]

We all had ample time to get the fuck off of XP by now. All the crying and whinging is stupid. Update your damn OS already. It's not Uncle Microsoft's fault you didn't get your ass in gear and set up an upgrade path sooner.

Of course no

[Hamsterdan]

That OS is 13-14 years old...

It won't stop working (well maybe the activation thingy), you just won't get any kind of security updates, and in some time, it will be unsupported by security software (kinda like 98)

I still have a 98SE machine running (for old games that don't work on modern windows versions), but with some caveats

1- It's not hooked up to the network, and will never be
2- Older hardware will not have driver updates
3- Transferring files is done via DVD-R or CD-R (because no, it won't be hooked up, and no, I don't want to install USB mass storage drivers on it)

The same can be done with XP (activating it might be fun without an internet connection, but I'm pretty sure MS could release a little program that activates XP (but probably won't))

I'm glad not to be working for an ISP, it's gonna be a nightmare for both customers and CSRs when the machines get infected