Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

There are dozens of us out here patiently awaiting a bunch of reasonably powerful new Linux machines.

You start high and negotiate down. If you start low, you’ll get even less

I have no idea what I’m supposed to see from you link? I don’t see any particular legal knowledge, or description of any particular legal consequences, and I have no idea what the point is???
Obviously software provided for free “as is”, cannot be required to be maintained. And if it is owned by the public which is the case with FOSS, there is no “owner” who can be made responsible.

If however the software is part of a commercial package, the one supplying the package has responsibility for the package supplied, you can’t just supply open source software as part of a commercial product, and waive all responsibility for your product in that regard.

Don’t manufacturers purposefuly destroy the computers and such just to ensure that doesn’t happen?

Just require any new operating systems to support 15 year old hardware. We should require manufacturers to provide 15 years of UEFI and firmware updates too.

I have had more issues with formatting between ms 365 desktop and ms 365 online than I’ve had with libreoffice

Dude, I’m so ready. Linux supports processors that old, by enthusiasts for free.

I admit it’s a complex topic, but if you read the post in detail, it should answer your questions. The “owner” is typically the maintainer, if in doubt that’s the person with repository write access. And the EU can apparently potentially require whatever to be maintained, not that I understand the exact details. The point was that the regulation doesn’t seem to avoid FOSS fallout well.

Hmmm, I don’t agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.

Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.

Windows used to support really old hardware, I believe more than 15 years old until they introduced the new requirements for particular CPU models and TPM 2.0 chips. If anything, I feel that 15 years is too short. iPads and Hadoop have nothing to do with PC hardware.

would this not be a good idea for a start up company that recycle computer parts?

I really don’t think so. Computer recycling already seems to be a low profit business, as evidenced by there not being any large companies that do it (that I’m aware of). This number of computers flooding the market would probably make it even less profitable. Sure, it may be profitable for some small businesses, but nothing on the scale required to address the problem.

Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS.

I strongly disagree. Ten years should be the bare minimum required. Windows used to support hardware way longer than 10 years and probably more than 15, until Windows 11 came out.

The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 95 is a bad example since it’s a 30 year old OS. It’s a completely different era with different OS architecture and different OS environment. Let’s instead use an example of an OS from the time frame being discussed: Windows 7, released a little over 15 years ago. There’s very little reason why a computer that was made since Windows 7 was released shouldn’t be able to run Windows 11. I think that this is a profit maximization decision on Microsoft’s part (less hardware support, less development and testing cost). They basically said screw the customers and screw the environment.

15 is an arbitrarily long time. I think forcing it to be open sourced upon the companies end of life is the better option

“owner” is typically the maintainer,

Nope, AFAIK that is not legally applicable, that is very clear with licenses like MIT BSD etc, and for GPL in all versions it’s very explicitly stated in the license.
You can also release as simply public domain, which very obviously means nobody owns as it is owned by everybody.
Generally if you give something away for free, you can’t be claimed to be the owner.
I have no idea where that idea should come from, some typical anti EU alarmists maybe? And I bet there is zero legal precedent for that. And I seriously doubt any lawyer would support your claim.

If however you choose a license where the creator keeps ownership it may be different, but then it’s not FOSS.

No. Manufacturers have no say in what happens to computer hardware after is sold.

Some companies may destroy the hard drives to make sure no data gets out. Some companies will remove the memory as well.

If the EU is going to pay for the developers, sure. I’d even go higher and say make it 50 years. Otherwise make your own OS or use Linux.

That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years

Windows is far more jank than a lot of Linux distros/desktop environments.

Like…

• Multiple different right click menus?
• No consistent and cohesive design language even throughout system or first party apps?
• Having to search online for an exe download page, download, open downloads folder, double click, click next through an installer? Then each app having to have its own update process, often that always runs in the background to check (or none at all)?
• Updates that happen when you don’t want them to, take forever, and break things?
• Fucking ads everywhere?
• Web results in your start menu before actual stuff on your system
• Multiple settings apps?
• Sleep that doesn’t work?
• Convoluted process for setting things as the default app?
• Dark mode that’s only functional for some apps?

It’s actually incredible how much money Microsoft has, and how much more they spend than probably all Linux DEs combined, but they’ve still yet to fix so much low hanging fruit.

yeah but you don’t pay 150euros for it + all the ads and stuffs

but yeah, I don’t see the point of this, it’s clearly aimed at Microsoft, and at this point alternative solutions exist

I almost feel like the compromise we will eventually land on is that if an OS maker like Microsoft wants to continue advertising on your OS they have to take some liability for its security.