China Bans Government Purchases of Windows 8

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Last week, China's Central Government Procurement Center posted a notice on new requirements for government tender, that included, among other things, the mysterious request that Windows 8 be excluded from the bidding process on computer purchases. The agency could not be reached Tuesday, but China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said that the government was forbidding the use of Windows 8 after Microsoft recently ended official support for Windows XP."

They are going back to OS/2

[jfdavis668]

Might as well use some other unsupported OS

And what's better?

[kevmatic]

If this is because they're upset at Microsoft for dropping XP support so quickly, then what are they going to? What OS has a longer support cycle than XP's 12.5 years?

Red Hat's is 10 years. AIX is 5-7. HP-UX is 8. Ubuntu LTS is 5 years. Mac OS is 4-ish. Solaris is likely the closest at 12 years... But its still less. Maybe they'll roll their own support?

Re:And what's better?

[jfdavis668]

Windows 2.0 was supported for 14 years

Missing the point

[Rant-a-Holic]

This is not about Windows 8. This is about the MS / NSA love affair. My company has done the exact same thing. No more windows after 7. Only approved Linux variants from here on....

Re:And what's better?

[Patch86]

It is disingenuous to count XP's support period from its first release date, considering that each Service Pack represented as big a change to the OS as each Ubuntu release (for example).

Support for original XP (without a Service Pack) ended in 2005- only 4 years supported. The last Service Pack, SP3, was released in 2008- giving it a respectable 6 years supported. If XP had exited support when it was scheduled to (2012- it was only extended due to a Microsoft product-line-up cockup at the hight of the netbook craze), it would have had 4 years in support too- less than any of the others you named.

Even if you stubbornly disagree with what I'm saying about SPs and wish to count it all the way from SP0-SP3 end of support, might I also reiterate above that support was only extended at the last minute due to a Microsoft cockup- namely, that Vista was wildly unsuited to the then very popular netbooks. The standard offer from Microsoft is 10 years support (which is what you might reasonably expect to receive from Windows 8). This is the same as Red Hat, and comparable with other Enterprise-market OSs.