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Kudos to Microsoft for doing this. Who else in the world is patching 16-year-old code well past it's EOL, for free?
by gaius 9y ago
Kudos to Microsoft for doing this. Who else in the world is patching 16-year-old code well past it's EOL, for free?
- askvictor 9y agoI'm sure you could find some oss projects
- IshKebab 9y agoI'm sure you can't. You might find open source projects that are older than 16 years, e.g. Linux. But that's not the same. Nobody is maintaining Linux 2.4, which was released in 2001. Its support only lasted until in 2010 as far as I can tell.
- zwerdlds 9y agoI think NetBSD qualifies for whatever criteria you're trying to express.
- askvictor 9y agoIn that case, let's compare apples with apples- the final release of XP was in 2008. So we're looking for software released on or before 2001, actively developed until 2008, then on life support since then. On the other hand, many oss projects have rolling releases, so trying to compare like this is futile, expect for the fact they have been maintained for a very long time. LaTeX 2e has been around since 1994 and is still the current, maintained version.
- AndrewOMartin 9y agoCertainly not the people whose code is much older than 16 years and not simply declared EOL for profit reasons.
- csydas 9y agoBlizzard? Diablo 2 got a patch just this year. I get what you're saying, it's nice that they're doing this, but it's not really so much a goodness of the heart thing as it is that there is a super critical bug to many versions of Windows and there happen to be enough XP machines around that they're a significant threat. The bugs are big enough and the threat great enough that there's probably less cost in patching than there is in dealing with any of the potential fallout.
- thehardsphere 9y agoThat's a mighty big assumption that they're doing it for free. It's very possible they have enterprise customers who paid, and now they're releasing for everybody. Dunno for sure because I'm not familiar with their practices here. But it's a thing.
- joosters 9y agoIt's downloadable for free, right there on the page. You are twisting the meaning of words for no good reason.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoI think OP meant that they didn't write the patch for free. Someone paid them to write it, then, once written they gave the patch away to everyone for free
- thehardsphere 9y agoThat is exactly what I meant.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoI don't remember their name. They're a small RTOS vendor based in San Diego. Maybe 8 years ago, we were using their previous (i.e., not under current development) RTOS, and we hit a bug. We called them up, asking for them to create a fix. My boss mentioned that our support agreement had lapsed (expecting that he would have to send them a check to get them to work on it). They said, "Doesn't matter. We wrote it; we'll fix it." I would gladly give them credit by name, if I could just remember who they are...
- mrpippy 9y agoExpress Logic? (makers of ThreadX)
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoYes, that sounds right.
- an27 9y agoSmall price to pay for having dominated the OS market for decades, by forcing OEM's to always only ship their OS...