“Blue light special” is nearly a synonym for KMart. If you search for “blue light special” at Wikipedia, you will be redirected to the entry for Kmart.
A “blue light special” consisted of a blue police light being turned on and a KMart employee announcing the special to all shoppers in the store.
As of Tuesday, July 14, 2015, there are now blue light specials on Windows Server 2003. Well, sans the blue police light and the KMart employee. But hackers will learn of vulnerabilities in Windows Server 2003 and there will be no patches to close off those opportunities.
The last patches for Windows Server 2003 were issued on Tuesday and are described at: Microsoft releases 14 bulletins on Patch Tuesday, ends Windows Server 2003 support.
You can purchase, from Microsoft, special support contracts but as the experience of the US Navy has shown, that can be an expensive proposition ($9.1 million per year).
That may sound like a lot of income, and it is to a small to medium company, but remember that $9.1 million is 0.00010% of Microsoft’s revenue as shown in its 2014 Annual Report.
I don’t know who to ask at Microsoft but they could should making Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, etc. into open source projects.
Some 61% of businesses are reported to still be using Windows Server 2003. Support beyond the end of life for Windows Server 2003 will be $600 per server, for the first year with higher fees to follow.
Although open sourcing Windows Server 2003 might cut into some of the maintenance contract income, it would greatly increase the pressure on businesses to migrate off of Windows Server 2003 as hackers get first hand access to this now ancient code base.
In some ways, open sourcing Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 could be a blue light special that benefits all shoppers.
Microsoft obtains the obvious benefits of greater demand, initially, for formal support contracts and in the long run, the decreasing costs of maintaining ancient code bases, plus new income from migrations.
People concerned with the security, or lack thereof in ancient systems gain first hand knowledge of those systems and bugs to avoid in the future.
IT departments benefit from having stronger grounds to argue that long delayed migrations must be undertaken or face the coming tide of zero-day vulnerabilities based on source code access.
Users benefit in the long run from the migration to modern computing architectures and their features. A jump comparable to going from a transistor radio to a smart phone.