Anyone can seek help on the open market to support Ubuntu 10.04 forever if they like. You can't go to another company if you don't like the price Microsoft sets for support for Windows XP.
This comment makes my blood boil. Please ask yourself:
1. why would anybody want to keep 10.04 alive?
2. do you think the type of people who stubbornly continue to use 10.04 would know/care enough about security to seek an alternative source for security patches?
edit: should maybe add why this pisses me off: just logged into a production server running 12.04, default install apache and updates _turned off_. the owner looked confused (and slightly bored) when I explained the problem to him.
I don't particularly care why an organization would want to maintain a piece of software indefinitely. That's not my problem.
I do think that's important to recognize that there is model under which an organization can. I'd even argue that it's a more "free market" than that of single-source proprietary software, too. If there's a market in maintaining non-proprietary software someone will pop up to fill it (even if it's just a lone-wolf consultant). With proprietary software that can't happen.
Whether or not an organization or individual chooses to maintain software is an orthogonal concern to the model under which they maintain it. Even when there is a free market for maintenance some will opt to eschew maintenance. Personally, I'd like those organizations to pay the cost by way of data loss, downtime, going out of business, etc.
I'm not overly worried about it. I think traditional regulatory and risk management will eventually catch up. Someday (hopefully sooner, rather than alter) businesses won't be able to get basic insurance policies unless they can prove they're doing IT maintenance, for example.
Whatever hardware that is running that 12.04 system can be upgraded, free of charge, for likely the next 20 years if the past 20 years of linux is anything to go by.
Even if you pay money for the windows 10, it is unlikely to even start on the hardware that XP ran on. Not only will the people have to go through the budget to pay for the software, but now you need a full upgrade plan.
To put this in a concrete example. If a hospital had a check-in system running 12.04 they could just take someone internal from IT and go and fix it. If it was Windows XP then they need to go through finance, then get a offers from competing companies, fitting the upgrading into the budget, and last have people installing it in each of the hospitals entrances. The first case has a project length of days and the other of months and in worst case years.
I understand the argument, but I think "just take someone internal from IT and go and fix it" is vastly oversimplifying the skills/manpower/time required for doing something like this.
I can only speak of my own experience as a sysadmin, but the more isolated the system is and the less critical it is for operation, the easier it is to delegate the job of doing a software update to coworkers and new hire. Especially if all the issues from doing an update has already been established on several other machines, in which case the update is more or less mechanical in nature.
It reminds me of the story about a thirty year old Commodore Amiga running the AC system for a school district. The district finally decided to modernize the AC for $2 million, but until then it was just cheaper and easier to continue paying a person to run it every year. Replacing hardware systems is expensive and political complicated, while continuing paying an employee is just status quo.
> Assuming these hospitals keep updating and do not get stuck at Ubuntu 10.04.
It's that simple.
If someone wants to continue using outdated software, they will want to keep supporting it. Free software lets them do that. Proprietary software specifically forbids it.
I think you missed the point being made by the person you replied to. The only 10.04 install you should encounter exists due to ignorance and not due to upgrade cost as with a non-open OS. XP/Vista/7/8/10 don't get upgraded due to them being proprietary and having a single point of support (concerning OS level exploits).
So, 1. because there is a community outside of a major corp who are active, so it isn't a burden on Canonical.
2. yes? see 1.
Should any IT professional not have upgraded from 10.04? No. It's free to upgrade, unlike Win which, remember, isn't a single upgrade, licensing is per user.
You too are missing the point. The same people who didn't upgrade from 10.04 would probably also not take advantage of the Microsofts offer to upgrade to win10 free of charge, because <reasons>.
I am so happy that win10 patches are mandatory despite all the whining. In fact, I want them to take it one step further and adopt the ChromeOS update model.
Hospitals run life critical equipment, Ubuntu is not suited for this. AFAIK hospital running linux choose debian for stability, or red hat for support.
XP is still in use for 2 reasons: cost and backwards compatibility.
For cost, CentOS, on it's own, is free. Support costs you of course, but the updates are coming down from RedHat for which there is enough money flowing in already, so support in this case means a sysadmin who understands CentOS and those are not that rare, not even that expensive.
Backwards compability is another topic, especially with the rise of systemd.
If the corresponding software is not included in any official or semi-official repositories (EPEL, for example), but is distributed with source, you may need someone to recompile it every 11 years, when you change mayor versions. I think this is reasonable to expect, though there might be issues for certain, especially if it involves Gnome3.
For those that are distributed without source code - well, that is the same problem as with XP, but usually it's possible to strace why it fails and fix/replace/dosomemagic with the underlying libraries it's depending on.
When this is not possible you can still create a container image with the old code to run it with.
With all the power out there even in the office workstations we could:
- install a base, damn stupid linux as hypervisor
- run windows in virtualbox with shared folders
- use btrfs for the shared folders and keep daily snapshots for a few weeks
If you get a virus, drop the image, get a new one, restore the snapshot, done.
If anyone is already using something like this, please tell, I'm curious.
> Backwards compability is another topic, especially with the rise of systemd.
User level ABI has had no important incompatibility since the glibc released with the kernel 2.6 (don't remember the version). That was some 15 years ago. Most applications didn't even break at that time, and core libraries promise more stability now.
That's nothing similar to the compatibility break between Windows XP and Vista. That transition broke most of the older applications, at the kernel level.
> That's nothing similar to the compatibility break between Windows XP and Vista. That transition broke most of the older applications, at the kernel level.
First i hear of this, so MS did a damn good job of papering over it.
The only Windows breakage on the software level i have noticed is the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit, and that has more to do with CPU modes than Windows internals.
But i keep battling crazy dependencies and odd breakages related to desktop software on Linux. Never mind that devs keep reinventing the wheel (how many VFS implementations have Gnome gone through now? 3? 4?).