Not indefinitely. It will get EOL'ed, and at that point it might not be possible to opt-out of the upgrade.
Which isn't bad given that MS isn't going to keep supporting W7 forever: It's a genuinely bad thing to have unpatched OSes with known security holes (zero-decade, I suppose?) out in the hands of non-technical users. That kind of thing was moderately acceptable when Average Windows User was behind a dial-up line, but those are going away, too.
a genuinely bad thing to have unpatched OSes with known security holes
If the OS is popular enough, once they get known, they will be fixed by the community if not MS. Look up "Windows 98SE Unofficial Service Pack" and "KernelEx". In fact the 98SE community is still very much alive... and has added support for a lot of things that MS didn't.
Gradually, I predict the same will happen with XP, and possibly 7 when MS stops supporting it.
Not indefinitely. It will get EOL'ed, and at that point it might not be possible to opt-out of the upgrade.
It's always possible to opt out of the upgrade with Windows 7. I have a perpetual licence to use it, and I can turn off any automatic updates that would break it.
The worst that will happen, short of Microsoft as a business going under or similarly dramatic changes, is that I will only enjoy free security updates from Microsoft until the end of the guaranteed support period (still several years away) and then I will have to use alternative means to secure my systems against any remaining threats.
As demonstrated by the large organisations still on XP, one of those means may simply be paying more money to Microsoft to continue supporting an older platform you want to keep using.
Not indefinitely. It will get EOL'ed, and at that point it might not be possible to opt-out of the upgrade.
Which isn't bad given that MS isn't going to keep supporting W7 forever: It's a genuinely bad thing to have unpatched OSes with known security holes (zero-decade, I suppose?) out in the hands of non-technical users. That kind of thing was moderately acceptable when Average Windows User was behind a dial-up line, but those are going away, too.