The company with the best track record of maintaining backwards compatibility in the entire tech industry owns Github. I'm not worried about that.
As for how long their tech lasts, I used XNA for a game jam in 2012, and had an alright experience. I could no longer download and use XNA by the time the 2013 game jam came around.
From experience: Word's still dropping support for older documents, and LibreOffice still supports them. (The only LO incompatibility I know is missing Math formulae sometimes, and that might have been fixed; if not, it's a fairly straightforward code change, since OOXML Math tags contain textboxes.)
At least that's what I understood. And it really sucked. I would even understand if they did not want to pay for open source images. But 1) give me more than 30 days 2) either remove my images or leave me in control to remove them later, not something in between.
Over a shorter time scale that would be called "bait and switch" and it would be illegal.
Over a longer time scale it's still a massive dick move and destroys customer trust.
No, it wouldn't. It would be "bait and switch" if you had committed to use Docker Hub for the next year, and they announced after two months that now you have to pay for it and you can't back out. If I offer you a piece of gum for free today, and tomorrow you come back and I say either pay $1 or you don't get my gum, have I committed any kind of fraud or whatever?
> Over a longer time scale it's still a massive dick move and destroys customer trust.
"Customers" on a free plan?
They also own TS, which seems to have major breaking changes each year and necessitate annual churn and refactoring of entire codebases. Windows having remarkable backwards compatibility does not mean the rest of their products do, too.
EDIT: I could also bring up one of their other products, Lean, whose 4.x versions have so much breakage that mathlib has been on a community-maintained fork of Lean 3 for as long as I can remember.
I figured it out from context but we really shouldn't have to. Type a few more characters, people...
We aren't all part of the same micro-community.
The bottom line is, one shouldn’t rely on a single corp for something that seems like “critical infrastructure”.
Having said that, Microsoft does sometimes break backwards compatibility.
I sell a Windows app (a battery meter) that cannot work on Windows 11 because the new Taskbar doesn’t expose an interface for plugins to render data on the taskbar (IDeskBand is the old interface).
So I can display a small window to the user but it’s far less convenient that showing it persistently in the taskbar.