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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.