Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 08, 2002 04:52 AM
> And finding people in the open source community to support linux 2.2 ten years from now is extremely hard.
Well, since the source code will be available, I would say that it will be much easier than it is to find support today for Windows 2.0, Windows/286, Windows/386, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 3.1, or any of the multiple early variations of Windows CE.
Note that each of those versions of Windows involved API changes for the application programmers.
Note, also, that Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 95, with support for Windows 98 and NT4 to be dropped next year:
> "While it may be old news to corporate IS managers, small businesses are just waking up to a harsh reality in the apparently one-horse-town world of operating systems. Microsoft is once again dangling the veiled threat of limited and withdrawn support to "encourage" (i.e. intimidate) customers into moving to either the Microsoft Windows 2000 or the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Windows XP OS platform."
Plus, if your applications are Open Source, it is very likely that you will still be able to run them on newer versions of Linux with just a recompile, or an easy porting job. Odds are that someone will have alredy done this, but, if not, you can do it yourself.
Compare that to the Windows case, where your old software is simply lost forever, because the company that wrote it is gone, or chose not to port it to newer versions of Windows.
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Re:Was just wondering.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 08, 2002 04:52 AMWell, since the source code will be available, I would say that it will be much easier than it is to find support today for Windows 2.0, Windows/286, Windows/386, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 3.1, or any of the multiple early variations of Windows CE.
Note that each of those versions of Windows involved API changes for the application programmers.
Note, also, that Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 95, with support for Windows 98 and NT4 to be dropped next year:
http://www.smallbiztechtalk.com/news/archives/tips 061801-bn1.htm
> "While it may be old news to corporate IS managers, small businesses are just waking up to a harsh reality in the apparently one-horse-town world of operating systems. Microsoft is once again dangling the veiled threat of limited and withdrawn support to "encourage" (i.e. intimidate) customers into moving to either the Microsoft Windows 2000 or the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Windows XP OS platform."
Plus, if your applications are Open Source, it is very likely that you will still be able to run them on newer versions of Linux with just a recompile, or an easy porting job. Odds are that someone will have alredy done this, but, if not, you can do it yourself.
Compare that to the Windows case, where your old software is simply lost forever, because the company that wrote it is gone, or chose not to port it to newer versions of Windows.
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