Reply to post: Re: What's to look forward to?

Re: What's to look forward to?

You are aware that is not sufficient to simply start talking about cars and expect that to carry any logical weight without showing that cars are actually analogous to operating systems?

There are quite a lot of similarities between providing service for vehicles and service for software. Both are complex technological systems, difficult to create and to maintain. Both have interface problems and might be mission critical. Both can be significant investments for a company.

And most important, both need maintenance during their complete lifetime.

Car suppliers are required by law to provide parts for a minimum time after end of vehicle production and sales. This is a basic requirement to allow product maintenance.

Analogous the availability to fix bugs and security holes is a basic requirement to allow maintenance of computers. If the producer of the software abandons it, while it is still used in a productive environment, it is nothing else than gross negligence.

As a fact, end of sales of PCs pre-installed with Windows XP was October 22, 2010. Microsoft could not be arsed to provide support for even 4 years. PCs have a lifetime of between 3 to 8 years, so I would say, they cut it short. That also fits to the number of 25% of WinXP usage in the internet.

If Microsoft doesn't want to give away patches for free, I'm completely OK with it. But they have to make them available for a reasonable fee for the expected lifetime of the product. 10 years seem to be fair for end user products. As for company products that are used in productive environments, I think 20 years would be reasonable. Again, for a reasonable fee, of course. Alternatively they might open the source, to allow servicing by 3rd parties.

People are traditionally accepting a lot of abuse from software vendors. Far more than they would from any other supplier. As software is now becoming a commodity, it is time software companies take their responsibility serious. Otherwise they WILL be regulated. Just as car companies were.