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Free Software Foundation Demands That Microsoft Release Windows 7 as Free Software

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 30 2020, @02:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the pull-the-other-one dept.

takyon writes:

Upcycle Windows 7

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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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:54AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:54AM (#951035) Journal

    If they released Win7, win10 disappears.

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:22PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:22PM (#951244) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:00PM (1 child)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:00PM (#951421) Homepage Journal

    Open source can't be in that state because people would simply stay with the old software, if the new isn't better.

    Cue the systemd comments.

    Sorry, I couldn't resist.

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    • (Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Friday January 31 2020, @01:01AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 31 2020, @01:01AM (#951523) Journal
      It's worth noting that when the systemd tarbaby entered some major distributions, they generated numerous forks. So one isn't stuck with systemd linux.