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On January 14th, Windows 7 reached its official "end-of-life," bringing an end to its updates as well as its ten years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security. The end of Windows 7's lifecycle gives Microsoft the perfect opportunity to undo past wrongs, and to upcycle it instead.
We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve. As there is already a precedent for releasing some core Windows utilities as free software, Microsoft has nothing to lose by liberating a version of their operating system that they themselves say has "reached its end."
Also at The Register and Wccftech.
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Free Software Foundation Demands That Microsoft Release Windows 7 as Free Software
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @02:48AM (9 children)
It's gonna take more than that - the perennial excuse is: "Release of the Windows 7 proprietary source code will reveal valuable intellectual property and trade secrets which are essential to the safety and security of the Windows 10 operating system, therefore we are not only legally protected from being forced to reveal our source code, keeping it secret is actually for the benefit of our current and future customers."
You could run all of Washington State off the methane from that pile of BS for decades, but... watch for it in the corporate responses, if they even bother to respond.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:47AM (4 children)
Passed through truth revealing machine, it says:
"Release of the Windows 7 proprietary source code will expose how truly bad our code is and why after 10 years of patches it still contains a vast and unknown number of critical safety flaws that we most assuredly don't want revealed for the benefit of our current and future customers because ignorance is bliss right?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @11:31AM (3 children)
While you might like to dream that Microsoft is a geek-run company, it is far from it. 90+% of MS employees (particularly when measured by salary+bonuses) neither know, nor care how bad MS code is - it's so irrelevant to their universe as to be unto theoretical particle physics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:32PM (2 children)
Not me! The word "you" can mean many things, so maybe you were addressing the general public.
I never had any respect for Bill Gates' technical prowess. Maybe in the 1970s he did some good stuff in context. I can't categorize him, other than to say he was a fierce competitor. Winning market share was far more important than product quality. And I understand that because I've worked too many hours/days/years for companies that pushed things out the door, ready or not.
I'm not sure if you were alluding to this, but your statement makes me think MS's code quality is related to quantum states, superposition, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:16PM
Me, too... it's a natural result of capitalism: Product on the market brings income, product in development costs money, companies live by income and die by expenses, that makes easy Darwinian math.
Not intentional, but probably a Freudian slip.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday January 31 2020, @09:56AM
Gates was an OK programmer back then, but not the genius his fans believe. I have known guys who were his equal or better. His most significant thing was writing BASIC interpreters, although some say he had access to previous souce code to help him in that. I guess that guys on this forum already know that he did not write DOS, let alone Windows, Office etc*. I doubt he wrote anyhing significant after about 1980, although no doubt he cast his eye over others' code at MS sometimes.
Gates' interest in philanthropy, love of being in the public eye, business ruthlessness, and love of money shows him to be a "people" person, not a geek. His fans assume he's one because he wears glasses, but his geek card card expired long ago.
BTW, I have not heard much of him lately. There was a rumour that he is getting dementia - does anyone know?
* Let alone invent PCs/GUIs/computers/the internet/the wheel/civilisation etc etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:41AM (3 children)
Maybe they will say that, but MS have very good commercial reasons not to release it anyway. So it won't happen.
It they did release it, others would take over the maintenance and security patching, thus undermining MS's campaign to get everyone onto Windows 10, their argument being that Win7 is no longer supported.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @11:34AM (2 children)
Anything that extends the life of older Windows products definitely undermines what I have perceived MS strategy to be since the 1980s: the upgrade treadmill. What's new for 10? We put a 10 on the box, and made it incompatible with some older stuff that we want to sell replacements for anyway. It's even worse for developers with the perpetual replacement and outdating of their APIs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:29PM (1 child)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:45PM
Maybe... I've only used GNU peripherally, though I will say that I have found it far easier to resurrect 20 year old GNU projects into new Linux OSs than 20 year old Microsoft projects into their new OSs.
I worked deep in MS APIs from 1990-2002, and found them to be a horrid treadmill with major breaks in compatibility every 3-4 years, or less. Even recently, my MS based coworkers jumped on "the latest thing" about 4 years ago and just last month they pushed a new API update that breaks the build for code more than two months old in our repo.
From 2006-present I have been working mostly in the Qt API (starting with 4.1) and I have found it to be a much MUCH more stable platform to work on. Even Qt3 code can still, today, be brought forward and used in Ubuntu 20 with a bit of effort, and the Qt4-5 transition was relatively painless - easy to stay in 4 for the first couple of years after 5 came out, and porting code from 4-5 is usually a pretty minor exercise - at least as compared to going from one Windows API to the next one.
🌻🌻 [google.com]