That's certainly a plausible alternative, I agree. Any way you cut it, the bottom line is that providing ongoing support for ageing software is very expensive, not to mention actively harming efforts to migrate a customer base to newer and better versions. No business is going to accept that kind of obligation without charging a realistic amount of money for meeting it, one way or another.

And Mark Zuckerberg has a lot more money than me, so I should go start a social network and then I'll surely become a billionaire in a few years.

You can't base credible economic policy and market regulation on carefully selected outliers like that. For every out-of-the-park success story like XP, there is a Vista (or usually many Vistas) where other developers put in time and money on the same scale and failed spectacularly.

If you want to use technology that works on that basis, nothing is stopping you from restricting yourself to Open Source software where you know it will be a viable option.

Microsoft has advertised the length of support that will be available for its major product lines for years in advance of their retirement dates, has already supported some of those products far beyond what any similar software developer in the industry offers, and offers newer products of similar types with ongoing support for many years to come. No-one can seriously claim they thought they were entitled to more than this when they bought Microsoft, and the failure of any large organisations to plan an effective IT strategy given, again, several years of advance notice of what was going to happen, is neither Microsoft's fault nor their responsibility.

That isn't a simple matter at all if you're still developing new versions of your product based on the same materials. You are proposing that a business whose primary asset is its collective knowledge should be required to give away the most important knowledge it has accumulated, at great cost, up to a certain point, just to absolve it of a hypothetical liability that it was never realistic to assign to that business in the first place.

...then a lot of houses would need expensive repairs after a few years to fix damage caused by subsidence, pests, unanticipated weather conditions, or the neighbours causing damage while doing work on their own property, while cheap clothes would be some of the most frequently returned items in stores because they fall apart after they've hardly been worn due to economising on manufacturing techniques and materials?

People talk a lot about how software is unreliable and breaks all the time, but the reality is that most consumer software is remarkably resilient given the many and varied jobs it needs to do and the cost of making it. I'm writing this on a Windows 7 PC that I've had for several years. I can count on my fingers the total number of times Windows has fallen over, and as far as I know all of them were actually caused by either a hardware failure or a dodgy update to some additional system software like a device driver or security tool, not by Windows itself. Sure, some software isn't up to scratch and the people who make it deserve to be criticised, but I don't think it's fair to claim that software in general is some sort of unusable, bug-ridden mess.

It's that first part that is the kicker, though, isn't it? It's great that digital works can be reproduced and distributed with very low marginal costs, but you still have to cover the sunk costs of the initial development. Those are huge for this kind of software project, and they are typically paid in advance and with no guaranteed level of return. The economic model has to take that into account or it won't work.

Of course they are. They are saying that as well as developing their code to make new products that they then sell (which they presumably want to do) Microsoft should also incur an indefinite, substantial, unfunded obligation to help people competing with those new products and using Microsoft's own code from their earlier products to do it. There is absolutely no business benefit to Microsoft for doing this, and the overheads involved are far higher than could reasonably be justified on the grounds of promoting general competition in the market.

That's a fair point, but I think it's more analogous to requiring Microsoft to disclose details of things like APIs and data formats required for interoperability (as others in this discussion have suggested) than to requiring Microsoft to disclose their source code. I think promoting interoperability and compatibility is generally beneficial, and as such I don't have the same objections to requiring a reasonable level API/format disclosure, where "reasonable" takes into account both the usefulness of any given disclosure and the burden imposed by requiring it.

Fair enough, though it wasn't really meant as a direct comparison, more an illustration of how much effort is required to support old software for extended periods.

It is. In fact, the period is now five years for both desktop and server versions.

Again, just to put that in perspective, Windows 7 (two generations after Windows XP) was released around 4.5 years ago.

Well, it would be great, in the short term, for everyone except Microsoft. But who is going to build the next software product that is so successful that almost everyone uses it for nearly a decade in that world?

That's just silly. Microsoft has done a huge amount to further software security over the years, and objectively their track record isn't bad at all compared to other large software vendors. They had the misfortune to be the biggest target in town for a long time (today that "honour" probably goes to Android) and so had to deal with both a relatively high number of attacks and a lot of bad press when something got through.

Supporting consumer grade software that is sold for ~$100 a time indefinitely, including providing full internal technical details to arbitrary additional parties, is a "pretty easy barrier"? I'm sorry, but that is absurd.

There are people in this discussion suggesting that someone who doesn't want to comply with such rules can go **** themselves and just give up on entering the US market. Well, guess what? They probably would. The burden imposed by this kind of requirement would almost certainly be prohibitive in cost. A vendor such as Microsoft would therefore do better to sacrifice the entire US market if it meant avoiding both an eternal unfunded mandate to support everything they ever sold and giving up their trade secrets to all their competitors.

There are also people in this discussion pointing out that other industries, such as automotive manufacture, involve a much higher level of safety standards and engineering approval. That is true, but cars typically cost 2-4 orders of magnitude more than commercial off-the-shelf software products, and they have working lifetimes that are probably shorter than Windows XP's 12+ years in many cases. Moreover, the auto manufacturers still aren't required to disclose the keys to the kingdom to the degree that is suggested here.

I'm all for developing good quality software, and if you're running a long-term software business then I think providing a reasonable degree of free-of-charge support to your existing customers is probably a good investment. But providing heavyweight support has a large cost, so unless you as a customer are willing either to regulate the industry and pay N times as much for your software purchases up-front or to pay the true cost of ongoing support via proper support contracts, I don't think it's realistic to expect that vendors will just cover that cost indefinitely out of their own pockets.

In fact, in the entire history of software development, that has almost never happened. Apple have released the first version of OS X around the same time as Microsoft released Windows XP, yet Apple have aggressively promoted numerous upgrades, most of which cost a significant amount of money, since that time, and somehow I suspect you'd have trouble getting full support for an original OS X system today. And to put this all in perspective Open Source darlings like Mozilla Firefox have "long term support" releases with lifetimes measured in months, not years. It's actually remarkable that Microsoft have offered free support to Windows XP for as long as they have, despite releasing not one but three successor generations of the product during that period.

It doesn't sound like they're using web apps, at least not yet. From TFA:

Right. But doesn't that give us the same problem as with libel? That is, the law works on a "no harm, no foul" basis, but it only considers monetary or otherwise quantifiable losses to be harm. With both privacy and defamation, the nastiest consequences of the antisocial behaviour often have nothing to do with money at all. If we're limiting the scope of the debate to possible civil actions and compensation measured by financial losses, I think we're missing the point of why privacy matters. That said, personally I'm very happy to see any move to take privacy more seriously at a political level.

From TFA:

It doesn't seem clear that they are proposing much of a ban on anything, really. This looks like more of a compensation scheme if someone does infringe on your privacy in this kind of way and you then suffer some significant, financially quantifiable harm from it.

I would argue that many/most infringements on privacy (or the chilling effect that comes from the threat of having your privacy infringed) are not so easily quantifiable, that the law in many places has little meaningful recognition of non-financial damage, and that some behaviours can't be fixed by compensation after the fact anyway. It doesn't look like they're going as far as addressing these issues so far, though.

Sadly, there are still a lot of people who will claim that even in cases like you describe, the phone had nothing to do with the bad driving.

I'll share a personal anecdote from yesterday. I was driving on some back streets on my way to a friend's house, the kind of roads where cars are parked down both sides so you've only got space for one car at a time in between (traffic can't pass in opposite directions without someone pulling over to give way).

As I'm coming up to a crossroads, someone in a 4x4, a big vehicle that is difficult to fit down these roads at the best of times, is coming the other way. Then they just stop, right in the middle of the road, blocking it completely, take out their phone and start making a call.

Now, I was the other side of the junction at that point, but clearly visible maybe 30m from the other vehicle, and my position and lack of turn signals implied that I was waiting to go down that road. They didn't even notice me for about half a minute.

When they eventually did, they pulled forward a bit to where there was a gap in the parked cars on one side (still chatting away on their phone) and started trying to reverse back into the space (still on the phone). I watched in horror as they came within probably an inch of the parked car just in front. Now, sure, they could have just been very good at manoeuvring their vehicle, but they'd have to be a pretty amazing driver to pass that close when at no point during the entire manoeuvre did they even look in that direction. Then they bumped up the kerb. Good thing the mother walking along the pavement with a pushchair had seen them and stopped well back, then. The driver proceeded to shuffle their vehicle around for probably another two minutes, chatting away throughout, until eventually they were far enough into the space that I could safely get past (though somehow they still managed to be nearly a foot away from the kerb, so good thing I was only a car trying to get past rather than something larger like an ambulance or fire engine, I guess).

It is a requirement for reaching driving test standard in the UK that a driver can perform that manoeuvre. If I'd been doing it in my car, I would have been off the road and into the space in maybe ten seconds, plus however long I'd had to wait to let the lady with the pushchair pass first just to be safe.

But I'm sure that just makes me the world's best driver and the guy in the 4x4 was just lucky to pass his test. Being on the phone surely had nothing to do with his apparent lack of awareness of other road users, a serious hazard on the pavement, or the position of other vehicles close to his own. And I'm sure his utter incompetence at getting his tank into the space (well, almost into the space, kind of, if we're being generous) had nothing to do with performing the whole manoeuvre one-handed or, at a few times, two-handed but with his head cocked at an angle to hold the phone so he couldn't look around instead.

I've shifted my position slightly on this over the years.

I used to be of the view that only a very small number of statutory driving offences should be required: dangerous driving, inconsiderate driving, driving without proper documentation/insurance, and that's about it. Allow each a reasonable but wide-ranging set of penalties to be used by the courts on a case-by-case basis, and you're done, right?

After reading a few discussions like this one, I realised the problem with that approach is that there's always That Guy who thinks he's the best driver in the world, and that none of the crazy things he's doing are dangerous or even inconsiderate to other road users, even though he's obviously much more likely to have an accident with serious consequences than most people. You know the guy, he's the one who thinks that running a red light several seconds late is fine because everyone who's now on green will take a second to get moving anyway, and that tailgating while flashing his lights aggressively at motorway speeds is harmless because he hasn't caused any accidents doing it yet.

This is the guy that specific laws, including the ones about mobile phone use, are aimed at. For similar reasons, I do think the government here made a mistake in banning only hand-held mobiles if they were going to ban mobiles at all. I understand that they were concerned about enforcement with hands-free kits, but if you remember when these laws first came in, all they really did was prompt 6ft high smiling cardboard people selling hands-free kits on the way into the supermarket with marketing claims like "Drive safe - use hands-free!". If you accept the evidence the government used to justify the ban in the first place as being reasonable, then that same evidence also showed that hands-free kits were almost as bad as hand-held, and they shouldn't have effectively encouraged hands-free use either.

I see a lot of people claiming "Studies show X", but no citations of actual studies that we can discuss in an informed way. Which one(s) are you talking about?