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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:12AM
Which is why my district has spent seven figures on Chromebooks. It runs all the software we want, is easy to administrate, and when it stops working we can just replace it with the next $80 machine. In this Web/App based world, the actual OS matters less and less as basically anything will run the software you need.