Note: Other platform functions still use os.popen(), you might open new issues.

_syscmd_ver:

    for cmd in ('ver', 'command /c ver', 'cmd /c ver'):
        try:
            pipe = os.popen(cmd)
    ...

def _syscmd_uname(option, default=''):
    ...
        f = os.popen('uname %s 2> %s' % (option, DEV_NULL))

Note: there is also platform.popen() which is deprecated since Python 3.3, we might also remove it from Python 3.7 as well (I think that it's now too late for Python 3.6).