[1996]

IDK, a long time I'd suppose?

The oldest programs I can use reliably are win32 inside wine.

It may not be what you think is technically the best, but office 2007 works well and many games and other specialized too. The office license is cheap and does most of what I need.

Someone mentionned below, a perpetual license of Mathematica for MacOSX will be useless in a year, because of the deprecation. Their mistake was not buying the Windows version.

That's why I still buy win32 software to this day. Their binaries will work on anything for a long time.

[a1369209993]

I think they mean:

> How long will [the MacOS hypervisor framework] exist?

[cwyers]

I think this is right. But I don't see any reason to believe the hypervisor APIs are in danger, unless I'm missing something.

[Spooky23]

That’s a great point! I’m bummed about 32bit ports of old games that won’t work anymore.

[oatmealsnap]

There must be open source editors available that have feature parity with 12yo software.

[1996]

Wine opens many new usecases. You realize the software rot myth was created by bad API deprecation pratices.

Think how different the market becomes when consumers can keep using a 12 years old license. You need to introduce fantastic new features to get my money. Changing the font, the menu and the colors won't do.

Even if it is free - why should I bother to learn this new software? The old license did cost me $5. If I misplace it, I can buy another for the same amount instead of paying year to year. And to this day it works reliably on every operating system I use.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

Well, then get to work.

Dethroning MS Office is going to be a long, hard battle, and it seems like not very many people are interested in fighting it.