Intellectual property law crushed by zombie horde
Opinion On April 8, 2014, Emmanuel III Delly, the Primate Emeritus of Babylon of the Chaldeans and erstwhile Primate of the Chaldean Catholic Church, departed this life, in the full expectation of an eternal life to come. On the same day, another entity entrenched in the lives of millions also passed away as Microsoft declared Windows XP to be EOL – end of life. This being technology rather than theology, the afterlife kicked in straight away. Nearly 10 years on, XP is still remarkably healthy and this illustrates a truth that commercial software companies try to deny.
It is somewhat fashionable to talk about software ecosystems. Programs are organisms with life cycles, exchanging data like food and energy, and affecting the bigger system in which they run. It’s a cute and useful metaphor, but it gets one thing horribly wrong: old software never dies. It becomes a zombie.
Take Windows XP. Since EOL, a variety of its validation and authentication services have been modified, peeled away or replaced to bypass Microsoft’s own services. Now, more than 20 years after it was launched, the activation key generation algorithm has been cracked, meaning anyone can install an entirely functional XP instance with no modifications. Nearly a decade of official deadness has left the OS easier to use than the day Microsoft declared the bucket kicked.
This extended life after death isn’t just common, it’s nearly universal. Nothing ever really dies. A creator can write a package’s obituary, but people will go on using it for years. Often a community will grow up around it to provide support, modifications, and even new versions; other times something will fade gently away until it re-emerges as collectible, reanimated retro. Sometimes, as in gaming, you can’t tell the two processes apart, yet the official narrative is that software has a manufacturer-defined life cycle.
