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posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 24 2020, @12:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-were-told dept.

German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.

Microsoft had long been warning users, both enterprises and individuals, that the end of support was nigh - 14 January - and made available various ways of keeping those updates flowing.

Alternatively there is always the option of a migration to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) with three years of free-ish support (because, y'know, you still have to pay for those Azure resources).

Finally, customers that had ponied up the cash for an E5 subscription could also be entitled to an extra year of Windows 7 security updates, through to 2021 (assuming the subscription stays active).

Blighty's very own NHS is an example of just such an organisation, having splashed the cash for some E5 goodness.

The position in which the German government now finds itself might raise a wry smile somewhere in Seattle.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @02:56PM (1 child)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday January 25 2020, @02:56PM (#948472) Journal

    There's no way to keep ahead by distro-hopping any more. Even if an individual distro gets it right for a time, the pool of available high quality programs is diminishing. There are several contributing factors. First is the reduction in quality coders - as more coders only know how to do browser or phone apps (and browsers are a shit platform with their own compromises), you don't see much in the way of innovation going on. This is a problem that isn't unique to open source, but when the only tools most coders have revolve around browsers and remote servers, it's the same as if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like it needs to be pounded on.

    Second is the lack of new tools. In the early pc days, you could buy more than half a dozen c compilers. There was real competition, and that competition was driven by the almighty buck. It worked to produce whole new categories of software. How many office suites can you get for Linux that are really fit for the name? How many different browsers (no, 10 variants of chrome is still a chromium monoculture). How many desktop publishing packages? How many complete DBMS packages that let you ship a complete system that doesn't depend on a browser for the front end? Where's the equivalent of PC-Tools if you want a one stop integrated package that does it all? Where's today's dBASE, Foxpro, Clipper, FileMaker Pro, PageMaker, CorelDraw, etc? Decades later, all we have is libreoffice/OpenOffice, the GIMP, gcc. None of these is really commercial grade software. The choice was between cheap and good - cheap won. People who even suggest that maybe we need to revive the closed source model so that there's money for developers and testers are vilified. It's a quasi religious stance, and the people who make the argument that open source is better refuse to look at the facts - bugs can sit for a decade unnoticed in critical packages, and the pool of people who worked on it originally is sometimes one person (as with the network time protocol software). Or heartbleed - a bug in OpenSSL that sat in the open for a couple of years.

    The third problem is the co-opting of the whole open source stack by the big companies, who are deciding what direction development money goes in, because there isn't any real paying customer base outside them that is buying products to help finance continued development. It's mostly the beggars bowl. So no real critical mass of paying customers exists.

    These problems are not fixable, and even if they were, the religious opposition to allowing closed source paid software to somehow "pollute" the "purity" of open source wouldn't allow any distro to adopt it. So if you want choices, the only *nix systems are from Apple. If you want to sell *nix software, again, Apple. Because a distro that caters to the paying market is somehow evil, and you're not even given that option. So you settle for increasingly limited selections of software with increasingly limited capabilities compared to what's possible, with a schizophrenic (systemd or no systemd) core OS.

    And what RedHat/IBM wants, they get. History repeats itself. It doesn't even rhyme - it's the exact same players as 40 years ago.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:16PM

    by Reziac (2489) on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:16PM (#948564) Homepage

    Also, at the business level, there's liability to consider. My sister's office discards anything that's not officially supported, from hardware to software to vehicles, because when you're dealing with megamillion dollar clients, and where if you fuck up, people die, you can't afford the potential for "You used software that's unsupported or not industry standard, and your building fell down. Here's your lawsuit." Opensource is completely out of the question, even if it were better software, because it's neither industry standard nor supported in an official, legally-defensible way.

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