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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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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(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]