If Windows XP is proven to be untenably insecure, anyone who bought it should receive a refund.
When I buy Windows, I agree to a warranty of sorts. They agree to supply updates to the software for a set period of time. Afterward, it is on me.
Nobody can write perfect software, it will age and break down. Nobody can engineer a perfect car, it will age and break down. Demanding infinite warranties is ridiculous.
Never. But it would be wrong for Ford to stop others to fix your car by providing no information about the car, which I believe is what Microsoft is doing with their obsolete Software pieces (including OS).
As that is the case here, They (Microsoft/Ford) are just lending you something, you won't ever own it. Would you agree with that?
(I am making no comment on the issue being discussed-- simply that this is a very poor analogy.)
And yes, I do think software can "wear out", not in the same sense as belts get worn and spark plugs physically wear away, but in the sense of threat landscapes changing over time and our understanding of how these systems are used in the world. This is why we do maintenance on our software and systems, much like we perform maintenance on things in our physical world. When you fail to perform this maintenance, bad things happen. Computers get hacked, cars have brakes fail.
Software can indeed age. Go run Windows 95 on the public internet or an early version of Android.
A decade in software engineering is a significant amount of time!
Software does wear out. New languages/frameworks are developed which makes it difficult to patch older stuff. New threats are developed, and it may be impossible to patch older stuff.
When you buy a house you have a whole battery of inspections performed to make sure that you're buying somewhere safe, but over time the small things that got overlooked (like a small crack in a roof joint) or were considered safe at the point of sale become worn, or are discovered to be unsafe (locks susceptible to bumplocking for instance).
It's a tenuous analogy to be sure, but I don't think it's reasonable to think that Microsoft should refund people who bought XP. Are there any Linux distributions that back port all fixes to version 0.1?
Given that MS even made a patch (which is generally equivalent to a recall), I'm not sure that your suggestion will be given that much credence. I mean, if we say that XP is an unsafe product, the government could stop them from selling it and to remove it from the shelves, but MS stopped selling the product in 2008 (nearly 10 years ago) and has repeated urged its customers to stop using it because it is insecure. This is all that the government generally requires in this situation as far as I can tell.
Edit: grammar
In the short term we need everyone to be better net citizens. That includes the businesses using this software to create the trillions of dollars of wealth on the global economy.
