Vista Displays the Perils of Closed-Source Software
I am sure that by now everyone is aware of the problems people have been having with Vista and the reluctance of businesses and home users alike to move from XP to Vista. Microsoft has already given XP another 6 months to live before it will no longer be avaliable for purchase and people will be forced to move to Vista, but people still want more. With the end of life for XP coming up soon, even with the delay, InfoWorld has started a petition to “Save XP.” Who knows how much success this petition will have, but I will be very surprised if Microsoft agrees to continue to sell XP forever, essentially admitting Vista was a flop. The effort that goes into this petition and other requests to “Save XP” might get the death of XP delayed for another few months, but not another five years, or however long it takes Microsoft to come out with the next version of Windows. It looks like everyone is stuck moving to Vista - or open-source software, where this problem could not possibly exist.
Take Ubuntu or any other open-source project, you can still get every version they ever released. For that matter, you can probably get every single beta they ever released. No one had to petition them to do that, that’s just how open-source software works. Better yet, if you do, for some strange reason, decide you want to use the very first version they ever made (or any version,) you are free to do anything to the code you want, so you can keep issuing security updates if you need to support a big business. If you wanted to use an old version of Windows, you would basically be stuck using an un-patched operating system. I am sure someone is saying right now, “but there aren’t any viruses for old versions of Windows anymore.” Actually, stories of old viruses popping up again are quite common. I remember recently a virus that was designed to spread on floppy disks got put on a bunch of computers and infected them.
When there is just one dominant closed-source vendor, users are at the mercy of a single corporate entity. If you don’t like what that entity is doing, tough luck. With open-source, you can modify and use the code however you want, whenever you want, no matter what.
