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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

>Should they get scrapped?

Of cause not, but the hospital knew that the Windows XP running their multi-million dollar scanners would be end-of-life before the scanner it self. They should have required that the software be placed in escrow for the life time of the scanner, so that other parties could do any needed updates, if the supplier failed to do so.

I'm sorry, I get that you can't throw away expensive hardware, just because Microsoft no longer patch that version of Windows required to run the software but: EVERYONE knew that the hardware would be in use beyond end of life date for the operating system. So why isn't that included in contracts and support plans? Do banks and hospitals even care enough to ask how the supplier plans to deal with an EOL operating system?

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> So why isn't that included in contracts and support plans? Do banks and hospitals even care enough to ask how the supplier plans to deal with an EOL operating system?

Well, maybe there's more to a complex organization like a bank or hospital than software licensing. Maybe their service contracts had these exact contingencies but they've run into other problems that nobody could have predicted when XP was new, like:

* That there would be a Great Recession that would wipe out a lot of firms, including banks, hospitals and medical device manufacturers.

* That there would be a massive new piece of legislation that would tax medical devices heavily, thus changing the way that market works.

* That the same piece of legislation would encourage hospitals to merge into each other through various incentives that were intended to limit the cost of healthcare.

* That Microsoft would decide to break backward compatibility sharply compared to what they did before. Don't laugh at this one; they were business for nearly 30 years when XP came out and never broke backwards compatibility as much as they did in the past 10.

My understanding is actually that in some cases, it's actually even prohibited to update some devices' software. From my understanding, the FDA approves/certifies the software image that controls some radiation-emitting hardware (like X-ray machines), and it can be in some cases unlawful to modify it.

If the actual X-ray machine itself is running Windows XP...

I suddenly feel less good about my next dentist appointment.

There's a sci-fi plot: AI creates malware that infects MRI machines running Windows and uses it to reprogram humans.

Plot twist: this has already been going on for decades.

Nobody expected a Windows release to completely trash hardware driver backward compatibility the way Vista did.

The fact that people are trapped on XP is Microsoft's fault. Because some manager in Microsoft decided that getting the upgrade numbers up by breaking hardware drivers was a good idea, you have a security nightmare decades on.

> They should have required that the software be placed in escrow for the life time of the scanner, so that other parties could do any needed updates, if the supplier failed to do so.

People do that?

If you're big enough, you can negotiate any contract you want.

And "if company ceases to maintain and release updates to product, we will receive the source code for our use" doesn't sound like too poison of a pill for Sales to push through.

I've worked on software for large pharma companies and several of our customers required escrow agreements. In our case it was to protect against us going under rather than just not wanting to do updates any more.

All the time, particularly for either very big contracts, or where a large customer is buying from a small supplier who they consider too much of a risk without it

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