Hacker News Reader

Comment by facorreia | Hacker News Reader

Windows XP was an extremely successful product. I have great respect for Microsoft for supporting it for 12 years. That's a great example of "long term support".

View on HN

I'm not disputing the general point; it is still long term support but isn't it much more reasonable to measure the time from the product's replacement not it's launch?

Vista was launched January 2007 so the support period after XP was the current product is 7 years not 12.

Even more to the point, XP machines were still being sold 4-5 years ago. I have one myself.

I think that there is a case for either of these dates. If you were buying after Vista launched there was an alternative (even if it was Vista) with a longer scheduled lifetime and you were making a choice to buy the end of life product. In a way it is better they sell you the obselete product if you need it (because it needs to work in your environment) rather than refuse to sell it because it only has 5 years life left.

Yeah, I'm gonna be 48 this year. Windows users have been proudly using XP for a quarter of my life. Hope I never get so set in my ways. I've been fighting the "it does everything I want it to do" attitude since the c64.

Linux, which is free, has been supported for longer, and is still being supported. MS should either open source XP and/or provide support for a further 3 years or so, which would be about 10 years of support after last official sales.

Please show me a couple of Linux distros which have/had been officially supported for more than 12 years. As far as I know there isn't any.

https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata...

In this sense, the XP will go into the "extended period". You will be able to download existing updates for it and read online documentation. Which is basically what the RHEL extended period is.

I assume you mean a specific release? Because several distros have been around since the 90s.

XP isn't a specific release. It has had 3 service packs, the 2nd of which could have been called a new version of Windows had they chosen, and has had continual bug fixes through its 12 years.

Forget about distributions, names, etc. Imagine you have a software that is critical to your business. You tested it on a specific version of an OS. Continued support means that you can keep using that OS and your software will very likely continue running on the OS without problems, and if there is something broken by a patch, then you can go and complain to them.

If your software runs on Ubuntu 7.04, you suddenly upgrade to 13.10 and your software stops working, then I don't think Canonical will take any responsibility or help you.

I know MS is not perfect in this either, and SP2 introduced quite significant changes, but fundamentally it's the same OS, same look, same UI paradigms, etc.; and they at least intended to keep themselves to the rules described above.

I don't think there are. Red Hat offer up to thirteen years, with the last three years being in the 'Extended Life Phase', which is very limited compared to the first ten.

https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata...

Windows is still being supported -- just not Windows XP. Linux is only supported as far back as version 2.6, and that support is similarly ending soon. Linux 2.4, which was released around the same time as XP, is no longer supported. I'm not sure how it follows from Linux's history that Windows XP should be open sourced.

Microsoft should do whatever makes the most sense for them and their customers...which probably is not to continue to support XP.

> open source XP

And who would publicly maintain and support it? Security researches may find bugs or even write patches for it, but IT departments aren't likely to deploy them any time soon.

Besides, it encompasses lots of third party software whose right holders might be hard to find or simply wouldn't agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com