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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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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @02:51AM (8 children)
This is a roundabout way of admitting that open source operating systems can't compete. Most people would rather pay Microsoft than use a free OS, because free still comes with plenty of hidden costs, from the need to switch distros on a regular basis because no distr has been able to satisfy everyone, and most eventually turn to crap, software that won't work, peripherals that won't work, and developers that don't want to write the same software for both a paying market and one that wants everything for free.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:10AM (3 children)
"This is a roundabout way of admitting that open source operating systems can't compete."
Nah, it is the FSF pushing for software rights. There are plenty of programs that will eventually be unsupported on Win10, and there are many many people who would benefit from open source Win 7. I applaud the FSF for not being evangelical fanatics who won't stand up for users just because they need software created by a greedy evil corporation.
I personally detest the trend of deprecating entire operating systems for no good reason. Software updates can force people into upgrading their OS because there is no method of regression. It is just a matter of time until the gap closes, linux distros have already achieved massive success compared to what anyone thought they could do.
If it wasn't for the desperate attempts at locking users into an ecosystem that gap would be much smaller.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:41AM
They won't admit there's a problem, because that would mean admitting that RMS was ultimately a bohemian anti capitalist nut bar factor 6. I have yet to see anyone proposing a solution. Close source software doesn't seem to have the same problem. Guess the market has spoken.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:13PM
Microsoft ending support for a 10-year-old OS isn't so different from e.g. Ubuntu ending support for an old LTS (in fact, it's 2 years longer than 16.04 was supported). The difference is, technically you could keep supporting it yourself, I guess...but let me know how well that goes, when all your packages stop working one by one over time due to dependency issues you have to manually fix yourself.
Or are you arguing the "for no good reason" angle of this statement?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Troll) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:30PM
Come off it. That has to be the biggest lie I've heard today, and I've heard quite a few. Remember when IBM was running ads on TV touting linux as the future. The future is here, and linux is, if anything, crappier than it was at the beginning of the century.
How many years did it take for people to stop saying "maybe THIS is the year of linux on the desktop?" Without a viable financial model for independent developers, it will ever be so. And since there is no viable financial model, so sad, too bad, we're fscked almost as much as RMS is.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:54AM (3 children)
And you are admitting that Microsoft couldn't compete against its own older products! That's a very dysfunctional state to be in where the closed software vendor deliberately forces its customers to worse software. Open source can't be in that state because people would simply stay with the old software, if the new isn't better.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:22PM
Of course they can't compete with their own products. Have you been living under a rock? Look how long XP lasted.
Or go back further. It took until Windows 3.1 for it to gain significant market share over plain old MS-DOS, and even Windows 9x ran atop MS-DOS 7x. Most Windows 9x games were really launchers for Dos4g games running in a dos extender. You could run them fine directly from DOS.
They finally sort-of killed DOS in XP, but it still had to be there for some things to work. I thought it was hilarious when I got a DOS error box in XP running an XP application that made a system call that XP didn't like.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:00PM (1 child)
Cue the systemd comments.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Friday January 31 2020, @01:01AM