I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world...

You can protect yourself from that with airgapping and backups. The bigger issue is probably that it's becoming increasingly hard to source parts for such old hardware.

But it's all in poetry, unfortunately.

If you are a big company there are often ESCROW agreements for things like this. I have encountered the “data dumps” from time to time and whilst it’s “better” it’s not ideal. Half finished documentarian, virtual machines of mis-configured OS installs… it’s almost as if it was just a straight copy of the development environment as it was just as they made the final version of the software…

But it’s better than nothing.

Main issue I can see with this forcing open source would be libraries and frameworks licensed from others who would likely still be in business and wouldn’t agree to those parts becoming open sourced. See also WinAMP https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/

The elevator was running Windows XP.

Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.

It's probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.

Screen? In a elevator?

Yes? That is not that unusual and it is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.

As I rode up to the 14th floor, my eyes were drawn to a screen built into the side of the lift.

Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They're still on 7 though.

Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It's a solid system, if you know what you're doing and how to use is safely.

That's what I think too. And then I see "Their systems are built into everything around us", which basically only applies to PCs and laptops. What is built into pretty much everything around us, is GnuLinux.

If a system is extremely old you can use Alpine Linux with no desktop environment

Dude, you clearly have no idea about proprietary and specialised hardware. Which is fine, but you're choosing to attack people from your ignorance.

Don't do that

Those screens can easily run on an integrated Raspberry Pi microcontroller, they dont exactly have complex graphics

there's a word for those people: awesome

windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary

I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.

I know it's not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of 'innovation' was pretty pointless. I personally don't think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can't do... (Of course I don't use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)

How else are you gonna show ads?

I had a 486DX running DOS for writing and editing CAM programs for CNC mills, lathes, pipe bender, and a laser cutter. And for funsies, an even older Macintosh that booted from a 5 1/4" floppy that ran a CMM, (co-ordinate measuring machine). And the software for the CMM ran from another 5 1/4" floppy.

This was about 2017 before I retired as a toolmaker.

https://www.fedoraproject.org/
https://linuxmint.com/
https://archlinux.org/
https://www.debian.org/
https://elementary.io/
https://system76.com/pop/

There are many safe open source options. If you need help there are ample resources available. If you want to you can also DM me.