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Subject: Re: Windows XP Support
From: Warren Young <wyml AT etr-usa DOT com>
In-Reply-To: <5692EEA8.4000703@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:45:53 -0700
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On Jan 10, 2016, at 4:52 PM, Juan Miguel Navarro Martínez <juanmi DOT 3000 AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
> 
> No software version can live forever

Indeed, not even Linux.

There’s a thread over on the CentOS mailing list right now started by someone who’s trying to get something working on CentOS 3, which is about three years younger than Windows XP, but which dropped out of support in 2010.  The answer is the same: no one’s going to help you, and if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.

And CentOS (RHEL, really) is the longest-supported open source Linux OS distro available.  SLES matches it, but there is no open source rebuild like CentOS is to RHEL; openSUSE only has a 3- or 4-year support cycle for its Evergreen releases.

Theoretically, some group of motivated developers could fork CentOS 3 and continue to maintain it indefinitely, but I haven’t seen the idea suggested on the mailing list.

My point is that even when the sources are freely available, it’s practically impossible to get developers to support ancient code.  There has to be a motivation, which is the support contract length in the case of the LTS Linuxes.  Once that runs out, the software developers are retasked.

The same is true over in Redmond.  The only difference is that there isn’t an open source version of Windows, so we can only speculate whether a sufficiently strong developer community could form around it to support it past the EOL date.

I suspect that’s the real reason Microsoft refuses to open source Windows: they’re worried that such a maintenance effort could form.  If there were a community-supported version of Windows XP, they’d have an even harder time getting people to adopt modern versions of Windows.  It would effectively fork the Windows platform.

Bottom line: it’s long past time to get off XP.  The Cygwin developers should not be expected to expend any additional effort to maintain XP compatibility.

> Linux Kernel LTS support is 2-3 years, for Debian is 1 year after
> release of next stable version, Ubuntu is 5 years and 9 months for STS
> and both LinuxMint and Trisquel 5 years as well.

RHEL/CentOS and SLES both have 10 year support cycles.

> At least Windows XP got 13 years of support and since Windows Vista its
> 10 years.

XP support was supposed to run for 10 years, too, but got pushed back twice due to customer base foot-dragging, IIRC.

Windows 8.1 extended support is scheduled to run for 10 years.  If you want to add in 8.0, that comes to 11.

Windows 10 is also scheduled for 10 years of extended support.

You can’t hold back the tide.
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