Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

It’s not business oriented, it provides a unique ID attached to the machine, cryptographically proven.

Next step is to use that unique ID to identify you on the internet and digital life. Ending all privacy.

You think this is far fetched? Kernel-level anti-cheat for games already does this and bans the machine from playing that game ever again.

Please no, just imagine the influx of 0-days

That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years

Did you actually read the quote I gave? I’m honestly confused.

Or legislate that unsupported software becomes public domain or is open for development and the public can try and make the updates themselves.

Forcing people to upgrade entirely depends on the nature of the upgrades and the motive of the company. What we need is competition so there are alternatives for people to use if they don’t want to upgrade. But somehow Microsoft is not considered the monopoly of the PC OS market, despite being a monopoly, and uses that position to force changes nobody wants but them, like turning window into an AI data farming scheme that violates user privacy.

No, OS makers should just not make their OS bloated with useless shit, stealing your data and have arbitrary system requirements. I think 15 years of OS updates is excessive unless we’re talking about servers or very specific workflows. IMO 5-10 years is enough.

That said, for some operating systems it doesn’t even make sense to support for THAT long, because how they are designed (A lot of Linux distros for example). It turns out, if you don’t break users’ workflow, they don’t mind to upgrade.

or by accepting donations exceeding the costs associated with the design,

I’m guessing that’s what you are referring to, this is not relevant to normal donations, but only a use of “donations” to circumvent regulation.
Show me any FOSS project that has donations exceeding costs of development, it’s basically non existent, only the Linux kernel project itself, which is fair enough to be covered, since the Linux kernel is driven by commercial interests today, and “donations” are payment for membership and influence.

The claim originally in this line of debate was that small projects could risk this, and no they can’t, only projects that are in reality commercial are affected. Those are very few, like Red Hat and the Linux kernel itself.
The legislators in EU are not morons, and they actually listen to the FOSS community.

You don’t typically pay to run Linux distros. They’re open-source. I can’t imagine they’d be subject to this.

I will stop discussing since suddenly this is about “normal” and I guess “abnormal” donations, and I don’t think we’re having a clear-headed debate here.

There really are differences, Linux kernel membership could be called based on donations, but they are clearly more than that.
Also you haven’t mentioned a single 1 man FOSS project that could be affected, which was the original claim could be even from just being a maintainer, which is bullshit.

We hear these EU warnings over and over again, and they are always wrong.

Because Linux is free software, we can implement the fixes ourselves.

Doing so with Windows or Crapple would literally be illegal.

Good.

If we’re going to pretend corporations are people, then we should treat them like slaves.

Or legislate that unsupported software becomes public domain or is open for development and the public can try and make the updates themselves.

Forcing people to upgrade entirely depends on the nature of the upgrades and the motive of the company. What we need is competition so there are alternatives for people to use if they don’t want to upgrade. But somehow Microsoft is not considered the monopoly of the PC OS market, despite being a monopoly, and uses that position to force changes nobody wants but them, like turning window into an AI data farming scheme that violates user privacy.

This is stupid.

15 years is a massive time to just update your OS.

15 years ago instagram didn’t exist, the iPad was new, and people were just updating from Vista to Windows 7. I think Hadoop was just created then.

That is a massive amount of time to support software that would have almost no architectural protection against things like heartbleed.

I think I’d prefer if there was a minimum updates guarantee that OS sellers would have to disclose, but even then I’m more in favour of other companies being able to pick up the work by making sure devices have their bootloader unlockable after they don’t get any more updates for X amount of time, rather than add burden to OS makers, because forcing people to support a project for Y amount of years would really harm indie developers releasing Linux distros and the like

Would Linux even count since it’s foss?

forcing people to support a project for Y amount of years would really harm indie developers releasing Linux distros and the like

Solution: implement as consumer protection that only applies to paid OS’s (and also ones that require a license, even if it’s “free” due to coming with the hardware)

This comes after e-waste watchers revealed that 75 million iPhones could be rendered obsolete – tipping the scales at around 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste – following the release of iOS 26.

Not strictly true because the phones they counted here will still get security updates for 2-3 years AFAIK. 7 year old phones, mind you. But yeah, no more feature updates. Which are so meaningless these days anyway.

The security updates for old iOS versions are a sleight of hand. Most companies only support the three latest versions of iOS, so soon that will be iOS 17 as the minimum. I had a device stuck on iOS 15, which was released in 2016, and banks and other major apps dropped support. So while the phone did get security updates, it can’t run the apps I needed.

Hmmm, I don’t agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.

Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.