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>If I buy a toaster it comes with a one year warranty, maybe. A nice car might come with a five year or two hundred thousand mile limited warranty. The analogy

>If I buy a toaster it comes with a one year warranty, maybe. A nice car might come with a five year or two hundred thousand mile limited warranty. The analogy falls down when you consider it's possible to fix your own toaster or car, or take it to some other engineer to do it. Cars last longer than 13 years due to servicing at garages and things like that. I agree that the implementation at the NHS is clearly awful, but it's crazy that staying on top of security means you're essentially forced to pay Microsoft more for a newer version of Windows (as well as retraining due to changes, retesting all your software). It's a mess of a situation and I don't know the solution, but continuing your analogy Microsoft should share the Windows source when they no longer support it so that third-parties can. I know that's never going to happen btw, just that's what's reasonable by your analogy.

Joeri 9y ago
They wouldn't need to share the source with everyone, just with authorized software repair companies. It would be a win-win, microsoft can cut back on support duration, they can collect a rent from the repair companies, there would be a new business sector, and customers could stay on older windows versions until a time of their choosing. Like with cars the older the version you are on the more expensive the upkeep, so it would be cheaper to move to a new windows version regularly, meaning microsoft wouldn't lose much in the way of windows license revenue.
- corney91 9y ago
  Good point, I intentionally left the phrase "open-source" out of my comment for that reason but didn't think it all the way through. There's clearly a need for this sort of support so it makes senses. Either that, or Windows should stop being overhauled every few years, making upgrades too costly to implement, and just focus on security and bug fixes. That's obviously not going to happen though.

Joeri 9y ago

They wouldn't need to share the source with everyone, just with authorized software repair companies. It would be a win-win, microsoft can cut back on support duration, they can collect a rent from the repair companies, there would be a new business sector, and customers could stay on older windows versions until a time of their choosing. Like with cars the older the version you are on the more expensive the upkeep, so it would be cheaper to move to a new windows version regularly, meaning microsoft wouldn't lose much in the way of windows license revenue.

corney91 9y ago
Good point, I intentionally left the phrase "open-source" out of my comment for that reason but didn't think it all the way through. There's clearly a need for this sort of support so it makes senses. Either that, or Windows should stop being overhauled every few years, making upgrades too costly to implement, and just focus on security and bug fixes. That's obviously not going to happen though.