Infrastructure

My 2 cents here, feel free to disagree or argument back.

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos wrote:

Some AOO apologists around the argument that their outdated software is useful for legacy systems and LibreOffice is not because we’ve dropped support for XP/Vista

• XP and Vista are out-of-maintenance by the software house that used to produce and maintain it. This means that anyone shouldn't use these softwares anymore and that they should evaluate and proceed to go to modern OSes (even if this imposes a change of hardware). Not doing so exposes the user to a lot of serious and mostly unknown issues on (mainly) the security side, and they should expect malfunctions and misbehaviors (e.g. lack of modern software);
• Based on the fact that they were developed in a very different technologies envinronment, they may not have state-of-art defenses (e.g. XP prior to SP2 does not have a firewall, which is considered base security nowadays). As such, intrinsecally permitting people to use machine with these OSes for productivity is like leaving them in a pit of lions;
• Since it is legacy software, even TDF would have issues in providing the necessary support and bugfixing, also increasing the number of platforms to be tested.

As such, my position is strongly against it.

You know, if AOO takes pride in supporting legacy, unprotected, undeveloped, obsolete platforms that are not anymore suitable for production, even adding their own stack of bugs on top of the ones of the OS, to people that refuse to understand explicit, clear, reasonable and obvious motivations why they shouldn't do what they are doing, I wouldn't mind letting them take the whole cake of such userbase.

To turn your suggestion in a more positive one, I think another idea to explore is to add a section/disclaimer to the download site targeted to XP/Vista users (here some JS/header matching technologies could help us in showing a targeted message to those; this can be extended for any unsupported system, like older version of GNU/Linux or macOS), explaining why we chose not to provide the downloads for these platforms. We may also even think of adding an explicit link to AOO if we feel particularily good towards the user. I think that this disclaimer has to be bound to a technical cookie to track if it was already seen and dismissed. Dismissal may be worded as "I understand this but I really want to proceed to the download page" and linking back to the download page without the disclaimer.

Yeah, I'm not sure we should give space to these. Looking at the market share data: https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/ we see that XP's share has halved in a year from 1,36% to 0,71%. So Vista & XP in total make up for about 1% of the current market share.

Like Linux’s total market share? Yet, nobody is asking to drop support for Linux. That argument is dumb.

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos wrote:

Like Linux’s total market share? Yet, nobody is asking to drop support for Linux. That argument is dumb.

Sorry, was not clear: that percentage is from Windows's own market share. Windows's total market share is about 76%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

The argument is not dumb, you apparently forgot that we are talking about EOL versions of an operating system, not an operating system as a whole. Also, you suddenly jumped into the topic of dropping support even though your original topic was about advertising a particular version.

The main issue here is avoiding clutter. Emiliano's proposal about user agent sniffing is one way to work around it.

IMO we shouldn't offer any version for XP. Our last versions which work on XP almost certainly have security vulnerabilities, being so old and unsupported, and that's a huge risk. Imagine if someone loses data (or worse) because they install a version advertised on our website -- and then go to the tech press. It'd be a disaster.