When your business model revolves around indefinitely maintaining backwards compatibility with every weird bug and quirk your enterprise customers baked into their workflows back in 1983 while also trying to be on the cutting-edge and constantly overhauling your products, it's hard to develop and maintain a modern operating system that isn't a completely horrible shitshow.
crispyflagstones
joined 4 months ago
Before long they're going to start floating some modern version of an indenture contract for service workers and arguing for the reinstatement of serfdom.
What gets me is how controversial things like this are in the US. Non-competes are antisocial, because they blunt one of the few mechanisms capitalism has to keep employers in check -- labor market mobility. One of the things that's supposed to make capitalism kind of okay is the fact that "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere." Well, if you're not allowed to start a business or get another job in your line of work for like years after you leave, how the hell are you supposed to actually do that? How does the labor market route around bad employers when workers are literally trapped?
Way I see it, a non-compete is just an employer's way of telling you they'd keep you trapped in a box in your off-hours if they could.
Yeah, they do the compatibility mode thing for older apps, but it seems like a lot of work to maintain separate shims for each older version that still have compatibility problems when you could just refactor everything with a reasonable amount of legacy support, and push all the users of really old software to start using VM instances of their old OS's. Surely these enormous financial institutions running bespoke financial apps using a custom COBOL interpreter that only works correctly in Windows 95, have the wherewithal to load up a VM.