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Some AOO apologists around the argument that their outdated software is useful for legacy systems and LibreOffice is not because we’ve dropped support for XP/Vista
That's perfectly true and I wouldn't change it for very specific and logic reasons:
- 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.
