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Munich still uses 41 proprietary apps that will only run under XP or 2000. The city has estimated it will cost $18M to replace them over a 4-year span.
Nick Heath at TechRepublic reports
Windows XP and 2000 are used by fewer than 1,500 of the more than 16,000 staff at the council, which relies on the aged Microsoft systems to run 41 applications.
[...] In order to stop using Windows XP and 2000, these 41 applications will either be migrated to a newer, supported operating system, replaced with more modern software, or phased out--as part of a four year project costing €16.6M ($18.03M).
[...] Munich carried on using XP and 2000 due to these 41 applications being used for crucial work in the city, from monitoring emissions for air pollution to flood protection.
To secure the OSes, Munich ran them on virtual machines and on standalone computers, as well as using what it calls "restrictive data interchange", quarantine systems, and additional protective measures.
The council has decided to stop using these older unsupported versions of Windows now as, not only are they a security risk, but according to a report [PDF, Deutsch] they have limited support for network and data security features the council wants to use.
[...] Often it can be the case that organisations can't update the application to run on a newer OS because the people with the necessary skills are gone or the company that originally wrote the software no longer exists.
[...] The project at Munich will be split into two phases: The first will assess the work needed and the second will carry it out. Work got underway at the end of [2015] and is expected to be complete by the end of September 2019.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 22 2016, @01:13PM
This. I worked a contract in the late 1990s for a major manufacturer [cummins.com], porting some of their legacy in-house data acquisition and reporting software at one of their U.S. factories from 16-bit to 32-bit. They were all Visual Studio projects under Microsoft's Windows. Even though I had their source, and I was going from an older version of Visual Studio to a newer one, the project was not trivial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @03:37PM
But what is unique to proprietary software is that it does not respect your freedoms. Want to make some changes to the software yourself, or hire some independent third party to do so? Too bad; you're a slave to the developers of the proprietary software. Not only that, but slimy companies like Microsoft often intentionally make their software incompatible with other, similar software so as to increase the costs of someone moving to competitors. Their software is inherently and intentionally defective. You don't find that with Free Software.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @05:12AM
But both gcc and glibc were intentionally broken multiple times in order to avoid leaving stable interfaces proprietary software could use to hook into the toolchain, while still claiming it didn't fall under the GPL.
It should be trivial to google and find the supporting links. But it was a major problem for pre-millenium linux development outside of the linux specific moving targets of that era, and was considered a major hurdle to wider adoption of gcc as a backend to other compiler frontends, outside of the normal GPL restrictions (since it had made even GPLed developments non-trivial to implement.) It is also part of the reason for the massive code generation incompatibilities between versions, since unnecessary changes were being made that broke things in subtle ways.
LLVM's popularity combined with the switch to C++ is only going to make things worse, as well.