WinXP source code leak

[LDAsh]

https://www.windowscentral.com/alleged- ... read-4chan

XP source code leaked - the operating system is an open book for hackers and authors of malware.
To such a degree that no firewall or application-protection will help it to be secure.
It will essentially be an offline OS.

Why is this a big deal for us? Well, I've spent a lot of time and energy to make sure 99% of the workflow is functional using XP, for the sake of straight-forward and affordable licensing of the OS for everyone on the team, no matter how big we get, and having an OS that can be installed offline without any personal information involved. If most people can mostly use XP (preferably Linux) in a professional capacity in the team, that's going to be a huge factor in the financial stability of things into the future. I've tried to push everything more toward Linux over the last few years, but the reality is that Windows is necessary. XP was the last Windows that Microsoft really had a global vision for, and since Vista, their licensing for scalable companies became obscure and money-grubbing. This doesn't affect most people, but when it does, it really does, and companies that don't get their licensing correct end up owing Microsoft a lot of money, much to its delight.

What does this mean for individual members of the team? Not a lot. Whatever OS you have and want to use, that's nobody's business but yours. But in a professional capacity, I highly recommend everyone to get used to Linux. When it comes time for final outputs/exports and pushing a final product, I can't be holding everyone's hand. If there is a way to fully isolate a virtualised version of XP, we'll do that. There will still be systems in the team using Window 7 and even 10, but minimal. These systems can probably be networked together these days, so while it sounds like a nightmare to be jumping around all these different operating systems constantly, you'd be surprised how easy we can make it.

You know what, ideally, what Microsoft should do in this circumstance is make XP free and open source, and have zero liability over it. Wouldn't that benefit everyone? Let people use it at their own risk (which most are anyway) and at least the community has the opportunity to patch vulnerabilities themselves. After all, if this global vision Microsoft had was ever true, that would sure be a way to prove it and now is the time.

As for which Linux distro exactly? That's the hardest decision. We'll need to look at which one has the largest support for the software in the workflow, as well as drivers for the hardware we're using, at the time. It will likely be a Ubuntu distro, so the common consensus is to give Linux Mint a whirl and you'd be up to scratch on most of it. Things like DarkRadiant, Blender, GIMP, ImageMagick, Inkscape, etc. are already in the official package repository.
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