Should software companies be obliged to support any and all of their programs they have that are still under copyright?
If they are, any programs they no longer support, such as Windows 98, will automatically fall into the public domain.
Surely this is only reasonable, particularly for things such as software patches for security flaws which are certainly caused by sloppy programming on the company’s part.
Hmm… I can almost agree. I wouldn’t extend that requirement to software that’s distributed for free. (Full disclosure: I’m a freeware author.)
But it’s pretty difficult to define “support”. Much of the support I give involves phrases like “There’s no way to do that yet, but maybe in the future”, or “That’s caused by a compiler/library/OS bug, don’t look at me”, or “I’ve heard reports of that bug, but I can’t fix it if I can’t reproduce it.” If you’re trying to put an end to security flaws, you’ll need a more stringent definition than simply responding to customers’ questions.
If your goal is to get unsupported software into the public domain, rather than forcing software companies to patch holes in their software, I think a better approach would be to lower the copyright term on software to 5 years. Life + 70 years is a joke when applied to computer programs; I have plenty of 10-15 year old applications that won’t even run on today’s hardware.
Define “software companies”. Much software is written and sold (or distributed for free under copyright) with no support whatsoever, by individuals or scattered groups of developers.
Or are you suggesting that any software under copyright at all must be “supported”?
Yeah, I think that when software ceases to be sold or supported, it should be released under the GPL or some similar license.
I think the OP is really aimed at MS support for their slightly older OSs 95/98. I don’t know what the support situation is for those but, yeah I think they should support OSs that are still in widespread use, or offer a free/inexpensive upgrade path.
There has to be some cutoff, anyone still running Win 3.11 would be foolish to expect any support. Same goes for older Mac OS.
The idea that all software goes open source after five years will not fly.
To give you the suppliers point of view a sort of idealised version of the sort of support issues we get here:
Customer: Hey we just tried this feature here and it’s broken.
Support: Yup we know about that it’s been fixed in version 5.2 you need to upgrade. The current version is 7.1.
Customer: Can’t you fix it for version 5.0, we’re still on 5.0
Support: Yes indeed, you haven’t upgraded for five years. You’ve missed out on five years’ worth of bug-fixes and upgrades now you’ve got to upgrade two major versions too get a fix we did three years ago.
Customer: If you give us the code for 5.0 we can fix it ourselves.*
Support: You need to upgrade. The current version is 7.1.
And so on. As it happens sometimes we do patch version 5.0 but dealing with customers who don’t keep up to date is a pain.
actually this never happens* but to make the point
**oh yeah it nearly happened once but when they got a look at the code they chickened out.