Hot take: but yes, it is. They sold the software and they are preventing anyone else from patching XP. I think that by doing so they have responsibility. If they don't want it then that's okay: just allow other people to patch XP.
The situation where I'm not able (or even legally allowed!) to patch my own computer system is pretty ridiculous. I'm not massively in to "Free Software" or the "four essential freedoms", but I do think people should have the freedom to fix software they bought ("right to repair").
I know how it works, I don't "buy" Windows, I buy a license to allow using it. I think is legal shenanigans and doesn't (or rather, shouldn't) really matter.
The entire thing is just a colossal waste of resources. Many organisations would be perfectly happy with XP, because a basic stable OS without too much fancy stuff is all they need, and XP offers that. It's not an "upgrade", it's just "replacing a working system with another working system".
Well, you almost had a point, but then you lost me. You are conflating two things, they sold you "a license" not "a license with free unlimited labour".
It sounds like what you're saying is that a company has no "right" to determine whether they wish to distribute a product of their labor using a copyright license of their choice. Under your system, they would be forced to give up this right and open source the product, or provide free unlimited updates. Sounds rather harsh on smaller software companies that don't make billions of dollars!
> but I do think people should have the freedom to fix software they bought ("right to repair").
People have been patching binaries themselves for the past several decades. AFAIK they haven't sued a user. But yes, it would be nice if this was codified in law that an end-user can patch a binary on their machine.
There's another way of saying it: the software has a defect, and not only does the vendor refuse to fix the defect, it also prevents me from fixing it.
With physical hardware people would be up in arms about it, but for software it's considered "normal". I don't think it should.
I'm not asking for "free unlimited labour", I just want software that 1) works and 2) doesn't need replacing at the cost of millions of dollars every few years. I don't think that's an especially ridiculous thing to ask for.
You don't need to "open source" the code in the sense of "put it on GitHub"; you can give people more limited access to the code (or just parts of the code).
Microsoft also sells maintenance contracts for Windows XP, but also to large bulk customers to the tune of millions of dollars. It could choose to sell it to anyone for $2/month or whatever price is realistic.
Either way, there are more options than "free unlimited labour" and "open source it".
>I'm not asking for "free unlimited labour", I just want software that 1) works and 2) doesn't need replacing at the cost of millions of dollars every few years. I don't think that's an especially ridiculous thing to ask for. You don't need to "open source" the code in the sense of "put it on GitHub"; you can give people more limited access to the code (or just parts of the code).
The problem is equating "you can" with "must be forced to".
>There's another way of saying it: the software has a defect, and not only does the vendor refuse to fix the defect, it also prevents me from fixing it.
>With physical hardware people would be up in arms about it, but for software it's considered "normal". I don't think it should.
That's quite an exaggeration. You can't realistically fix bugs in CPU chips, or USB micro-controllers or bluetooth radios or cellphone antenna radio chips. "So then Intel should open up their CPU design" and/or "But I should be able to" is not really an argument, because anyone could say the opposite and be on equal grounds.
So now, the only principal argument that I can see us having is "should freedoms have limits" or "what freedoms are essential", and we would probably agree on most things, but it seems to me that we just come out at different positions on a spectrum.
>Microsoft also sells maintenance contracts for Windows XP, but also to large bulk customers to the tune of millions of dollars. It could choose to sell it to anyone for $2/month or whatever price is realistic.
Okay, but that is a business decision that was made because a lucrative customer demanded it as a requirement before purchase. I don't see the connection. Both parties entered into a voluntary contract... well for the most part.
On the other extreme, you are free to hire a software developer, and get software made which you can choose to release under an open source license.
Personally I happen to think that data interoperability is more crucial than the software itself. All software does in the end is just manipulate data. Its possible to have a rich variety of software when the data interchange format is standardized and protected from monopolistic abuse. The foremost example being the internet packet protocols.
> I'm not massively in to "Free Software" or the "four essential freedoms", but I do think people should have the freedom to fix software they bought ("right to repair").
Doesn't the first part of your sentence contradict the second? The only way it would be possible to patch software yourself is if you had the source code.
(I suppose you could reverse engineer the binary, but that's not practical, and besides, you could do that today if you wanted to.)
The four freedoms go far beyond just the ability to fix stuff. It also includes the ability to redistribute copies and modified versions.
I think there are more options than just "open source it all" and "keep it all proprietary". You could, for example, only provide the source code (or parts of the source) under a NDA contract when requested and merge "community fixes" upstream, or something. I don't know what would work well in practice (not many businesses have experimented with it) but I'm fairly confident a model can be though of that works well yet isn't "open source" in the sense that we understand it today.
Except part of an OS is security. Just like you wouldn't keep an old skeleton key on the front door of your business because of the risk of someone breaking in, you may feel it isn't worth the risk to use an old OS that has an obsolete security model.
The flip side of this is that there has to be an acceptable newer replacement with a better security model. For a lot of Windows 7 users, Microsoft have yet to offer that. (I imagine this is going to cause quite a stir if Microsoft try to stick to their published EOL date for Windows 7 next year, given that still nearly half of Windows users are using it.)
They could create a premium, telemetry-free version of LTSB/LTSC for the several hundred million Windows 7 users who are waiting for the market to provide an upgrade path which supports modern hardware.
If they made Windows 10 Pro more like the Pro edition of earlier versions, i.e., targeted at smaller businesses or power users who want a professional OS but not all the enterprise hassle, I would think they could do very well. But a professional OS doesn't do things like taking control of your computer to update or reboot whenever it feels like it or forcing you to upload any data you don't want to.
I have a suspicion that at some point Microsoft are going to back down on the big deal-breakers. They don't try to push their luck with those kinds of games in their enterprise products, because the big customers simply won't accept them. The frequent failures are just proving the critics right, and there have already been tentative moves to moderate the problems with mandatory updates. If changes in that sort of direction go far enough, they will appeal to smaller but serious customers who aren't running enterprise editions but have similar concerns.
If Microsoft really don't take the hint and back down when it comes to the crunch, I suspect Windows 7 will make the immortality of XP look like an amateurish trial run. I know my businesses all stocked up on Windows 7 machines a couple of years back while we still could, and since then we've been actively investigating multiple possible alternatives to Windows desktops for future use. Looking for alternatives seems to be the general trend across the other small tech businesses within my network as well, so if Microsoft think they're going to call everyone's bluff and get the whole world to migrate to 10 next year by shutting off updates for 7, I suspect they have seriously misjudged their market.
The security as new functionality is not really an issue to keep PCs running relatively safe. The argument that ECC is a new functionality and not a security patch comes to mind. That was a fair argument and people still had RSA. The underlying security breaking is not really an issue today as far as I see it.
The actual deal breaker are bugs who can be exploited and need to be fixed. And while its unfair to expect bug free software, fixing them is not new functionality.
It may not be their responsibility, so to speak, but if they choose to do it to help maintain their “we’re the best solution for enterprise customers, look we still release security patches years after EOL, that’s how much we care about reliability, blah blah blah” stance, who’s to say they shouldn’t do it?
By law, I suppose not. Morally, it depends on whom you ask.
If it were open source, other people could pick it up (gratis or for a fee). Right now, nobody can (except for Microsoft), because it is proprietary software. Microsoft brought it upon themselves to release the software as such.
If they did this how long before Windows XP Mint was released?
More seriously, how much of their code could they release without giving away much of their next operating system. Certainly by the fact that this bug effects versions of the OS going back 15 years we can be relatively certain that the code contained between them has a lot of identical parts.
"Release the source code" does not necessarily equal "allowing people to make derivative products from it". You could release it under a strict "only to be used to fix defects"-license.
It wouldn't be "open source" or "free software" as we understand it today, but I don't mind, and it's a lot better than what we have now.
