Slashdot Asks: Will You Need the Windows XP Black Market? 245
NicknamesAreStupid (1040118) writes "As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'. However, most will be the 'have nots.' Anytime you have such market imbalance, there is opportunity. Since Microsoft clearly intends to create a disparity, there will certainly be those who defy it. What will Microsoft do to prevent bootleg patches of XP from being sold to the unwashed masses? How will they stop China from supporting 100 million bootleg XP users? And how easily will it be to crack Microsoft's controls? How big will the Windows XP patch market be?"
There are a lot of businesses still on Windows XP; if you work for one of them, will the official end of life spur actually cause you to upgrade? (And if so, to what?)
How much does it cost to upgrade? (Score:4, Interesting)
If UK govt paid $9M for 12 months, how much does it cost to upgrade 680,000 PC's? A lot of them will probably need new hardware.
At a pure guess of $500 per PC, including new Office licenses, some new hardware, labour, etc. over 12 months, $9M is only 3% of the total cost. They could invest the upgrade money and make a profit from buying extended support.
Running XP on several machines now (Score:4, Interesting)
What will I do? Probably keep working from a known image and patch it up as best I can.
In other words, the same thing I've done with legacy DOS, 95, Novell, 98 and 2k systems.
My hope is that at some point I can find a low-overhead Linux or BSD system to use as a VM host, and then have access to every operating system since the dawn of the 4004.
Legacy Software Limitations (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Updates more likely to infringe than drivers, A (Score:4, Interesting)
How would [providing third-party updates to Windows XP components] be different from (i.e. less legitimate than) publishing a device driver, AV suite, or other system-level software?
Device drivers, antivirus suites, and the like don't need to replace Windows system files with fixed versions of the same code to function. Windows updates do. And because they'd be providing versions of the same (Microsoft) code without the permission of the owner of copyright in that code, they would likely infringe* Microsoft's copyright.
* Slashdot posts aren't Legal Advice(tm).
It wouldn't be possible to provide only a binary patch that contains just the modifications to said files? That would also infringe copyright?
Re:NO (Score:5, Interesting)