I don't have a few million, but a group able to cobble together a few
million is more realistic to put together.
Question is, how much would membership cost in a group whose goal is
to GPL Windows 16 and 32 bit be? Say such a group came into existence
and a million people joined for $20/month. The first target, Windows
16 bit land. Then, the 32 bit version of Windows including 9x and ME.
Eventually, the group would be able to open source the MS-DOS based
versions of Windows completely and membership fees could be reduced or
even dropped. Maybe the source code isn't needed, maybe just the
interfaces and the design are needed.
Quoting Jon Brase <jon.br...@gmail.com>:
If you can cut a check for a few million, Microsoft might sell you
the rights (to the components that they created themselves, of
course, not anything they licensed from others), give you whatever
source code they still have archived, and let you license it to the
public as you choose.
If you can't cut a check, but ask nicely, they have been open
sourcing things that nobody ever thought they'd open source, so
maybe they will eventually open-source Win9x. Frankly, though, I'd
rather concentrate on getting them to just release all their old
Win16 code (Win3, the Win16 components of Win9x, and NTVDM): that's
the part of the PC ecosystem where vintage applications are in most
danger of being lost because nobody has an environment to run them
on anymore: DOS is fairly well covered by DOSBox, FreeDOS, etc, and
Win32 is still an environment that Microsoft maintains, that people
actively write applications for, and that the Wine project is
putting a fair bit of effort into implementing well. Win16, on the
other hand, is somewhat neglected by both MS and Wine, and it would
be good if the old MS source code could be released, or, failing
that, the binaries could at least be put under an open-source
license that explicitly allowed reverse engineering.
-------- Original message --------
From: Michael C Robinson <mich...@robinson-west.com>
Date: 9/26/2019 08:35 (GMT-06:00)
To: p...@lists.pdxlinux.org
Cc: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Freedos-user] Source code to Windows 9x and ME...
Is it possible to get the source code to Windows 9x and ME since
Microsoft isn't supporting it anymore?
One would want to get the source code and then open source it of
course. Even Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.11 is closed source. Surely,
Microsoft could release pre 9x Windows? It wouldn't hurt Microsoft at
all since Windows
is squarely NT based now where many modern systems won't even support
DOS let alone DOS based Windows. I realize it would probably be very
expensive to get Microsoft to cough up the source code, but has anyone
even looked into this?
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