this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Your Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk' - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you're still using Windows 10 and don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition

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[–] punkwalrus@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.

"Nothing we can do," Microsoft said. "We have no gate key."

Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, "okay," and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.

"Oh, you mean this gate key," said Microsoft.

Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.