Microsoft *has* released the entirety of early versions of DOS under (IIRC) the MIT license, as well as (IIRC) the old Win3 file manager, and has in recent years been much friendlier to Open Source than in the past. As to where the money is in open sourcing old code, I think part of it is the advantages that a good reputation creates with regards to, for example, hiring good talent. With regards to your item (1), old components may still be in use, but are unlikely to be the "secret sauce" that makes Windows a better buy than its competitors at this stage. (2), I think is probably the biggest thing blocking the release of old code.
-------- Original message -------- From: andrew fabbro <and...@fabbro.org> Date: 9/26/2019 08:52 (GMT-06:00) To: "Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS." <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Cc: p...@lists.pdxlinux.org Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Source code to Windows 9x and ME... On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 6:36 AM Michael C Robinson <mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote: 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? "It wouldn't hurt Microsoft" is not exactly a true statement. Major reasons MSFT won't be releasing source code like that: (1) Some components are still in use. Microsoft does not rewrite their OS from scratch with each new version and while Windows 10 is very different than Windows Me, it's still an x86 OS. (2) There may be pieces they licensed or are under others' copyrights. Sorting that out is non-trivial. This is true especially of things like drivers. (3) Source code often reveals the inner workings of companies and products. It's not unusual to see things like "we put this in because our other product has a bug and we have to compensate" and comments like that. Not to mention profanity :-) (4) Many times old source code hides other embarrassing (or semi-embarrassing) secrets. There was a leak of Windows 2000 many years ago and I read that it had comments such as "(some app) breaks here so we put in this workaround to maintain compatibility with previous versions". This would inevitably lead to all kinds of press about favoring different vendors, etc. (5) And the big one...where's the money in releasing old source code? It takes lawyers, tech people, etc. and likely would cost a fair amount of money just to package it up. BTW, Microsoft has (or at least at one time had) various programs where universities had access to the source code, but that was under NDA. -- andrew fabbroand...@fabbro.org
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