Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > If these systems were running Debian, big organisations like the British > government could hire people to provide security support for their > users, even for versions which we no longer support. When the obsolete > operating system is Windows, they can only hire Microsoft, who can set > the price at whatever they think the market will bear.
> As it happens this particular vulnerability was indeed fixed by > Microsoft, and that the UK NHS suffered so much is because of government > and management failures[1]. But in general, users who for any reason > are stuck on very old systems are in a much better position if those > systems are free software. That's a very good point that I neglected. Thank you for adding that! > Also, Debian's engineering approaches mean it's easier to support > obsolete environments, eg via chroots and/or mixed systems and/or > selective backporting. Also a good point. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
