Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.

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

This would almost certainly rule out Linux as an option. What Linux vendor feels comfortable committing to something, anything, for 15 years?

Of course. Make another regulation only big corps can follow. To punish them, of course. This is punishment.

These multi-billion dollar corporations have more than enough resources to provide updates for 15 years.

There’s nothing insane about it, unless you’ve been conditioned to live vicariously through business owners.

Pretty sure postmarketOS isn’t made by a multi-billion dollar corporation. Such a requirement would mean ONLY multi-billion dollar corporations can release an operating system. You do not want to give them that power.

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

but also by charging a price for technical support

Which exactly includes systems like RedHat which I already included, but in no way includes voluntary FOSS work for free.

an intention to monetise

Again it’s very much about the money, and being non free both as in beer and in freedom.

just donations can already be a problem, apparently. But IANAL.

NOPE!!!
Donations are not a charge. A donation is as the word says a donation typically to support a voluntary effort or an organization working for the common good in some way.
A donation does not require anything in return.

Why are you making scaremongering arguments from ignorance?

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.