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My bias is definitely to agree with this sentiment, but I'm going to play devil's advocate: Windows 10 automatically updates itself, which is a reasonable thin

My bias is definitely to agree with this sentiment, but I'm going to play devil's advocate: Windows 10 automatically updates itself, which is a reasonable thing for a consumer operating system to do. It happens to be a very "wide and deep" OS which includes a lot of userland stuff as part of the same release bundle, like OS X/macOS. There are FOSS projects that also operate this way. The GNOME environment comes to mind as a similarly "wide and deep" example. I myself have had the experience of having a GNOME feature I was using removed after an update. The recourse in that case isn't much different from the recourse in the Windows 10 Flash case. You can either live without the removed thing or find a third party solution. What you can't do is just stop updating the thing; you'd lose (community) support and important bug fixes. Of course, as long as it's FOSS you can just fork it, right? But really that's not the appropriate solution for cases like this. We're talking about the removal of a basically stand-alone feature. If the official bundle stops supporting that thing, forking the bundle is not the way forward. Bringing in a third party is. So the way I see it, both the problem and the solution here are the same for both Windows and large FOSS software bundles like GNOME. They're the opposite of narrow projects, so stuff is bound to get removed eventually. You can't stay on an old version, you shouldn't fork, and in some cases you probably shouldn't even protest, as the reasoning for removal may be sound.

throwaway201103 6y ago
> What you can't do is just stop updating the thing That's the choice being argued. You should have that option. It's unreasonable to expect that old software will always be supported. There is a real cost to it. But as long as I still have the machine it should be my choice as to when it no longer does the things I need it to do (at least until the point of physical failure).
- rcoveson 6y ago
  I didn't mean it that way. I meant to point out that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place whether you're a GNOME user or Windows 10 user. It's possible to stop updating, but you probably can't, because you probably need something in some Windows or GNOME release down the road.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    Ah yes that is true. It's a tradeoff between how much you need the old software to keep working and how much you need the other updates to the platform.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    The nice thing about OSS software is that you actually can selectively pull patches from upstream to build your own stable version. It’s way too much effort to do to for all software you use but not too unreasonable for your most used tools. At work we maintain lots of forks of libs we use. I maintain a fork of Ansible that has niceties like blocks you can loop over. It’s somewhat controversial to patch in features but we ended up deciding that it’s more important for software to do what we want.

throwaway201103 6y ago

> What you can't do is just stop updating the thing That's the choice being argued. You should have that option. It's unreasonable to expect that old software will always be supported. There is a real cost to it. But as long as I still have the machine it should be my choice as to when it no longer does the things I need it to do (at least until the point of physical failure).

rcoveson 6y ago
I didn't mean it that way. I meant to point out that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place whether you're a GNOME user or Windows 10 user. It's possible to stop updating, but you probably can't, because you probably need something in some Windows or GNOME release down the road.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Ah yes that is true. It's a tradeoff between how much you need the old software to keep working and how much you need the other updates to the platform.
- Spivak 6y ago
  The nice thing about OSS software is that you actually can selectively pull patches from upstream to build your own stable version. It’s way too much effort to do to for all software you use but not too unreasonable for your most used tools. At work we maintain lots of forks of libs we use. I maintain a fork of Ansible that has niceties like blocks you can loop over. It’s somewhat controversial to patch in features but we ended up deciding that it’s more important for software to do what we want.