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posted by
LaminatorX
on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:04AM
from the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
from the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
Lagg and Uncle_Al both wrote in about this surprising source release.
Lagg writes:
Today a technet article was posted by a Microsoft employee announcing that they are releasing to the Computer History Museum and the public at large the source code to v1.1 and 2.0 of MS-DOS as well as v1.1a of Word. All obvious jokes aside this could be good for projects such as DOSBox. Note also that said employee considers 300kb to be small for source code. Seems rather large to me, even now. But in any case this will be an interesting thing to dig into. To save the trouble of link chasing here are the relevant links:
Computer history article for MS-DOS (direct link to source)
Computer history article for Word (direct link to source)
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Microsoft Releases MSDOS 2 and WFW 1 Sources
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:24AM
That's all that matters... and of course following the best /. tradition goes unmentioned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by omoc on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:50AM
I was just about to write the same thing. Source is released but not *free*, the website states in the license agreement:
"You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works."
(Score: 2) by duvel on Wednesday March 26 2014, @05:39AM
Considering that the code MS is releasing is very old and that they're not even releasing it under GPL (or similar), this is a typical 'too little, too late' story. The main reason for this move by MS may well be to look better (but only to the uninformed).
This Sig is under surveilance by the NSA
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marneus68 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @06:30AM
...and it sucks.e -code/agreement/ [computerhistory.org]
http://www.computerhistory.org/ms-dos-early-sourc
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:34PM
The relevant part:
=======
You may use, copy, compile, and create Derivative Works of the software, and run the software and Derivative Works on simulators or hardware solely for non-commercial research, experimentation, and educational purposes. Examples of non-commercial uses are teaching, academic research, public demonstrations, and personal experimentation.
=======
Basically, do whatever the hell you want with it for personal, research, or educational use; just don't use it for commercial purposes.
Microsoft's ability to release source unencumbered to the public may be under constraints due to contracts we don't know about (they have released source to various partners in the past). It is =doubtless= under constraints applied by their legal counsel. It may have been under nondisclosure agreements (notably with IBM) that have finally expired for this very old code.
They don't have to do this. Yeah, it's real little real late. But it's a start. If it buys them a little goodwill, they may do it again, and eventually they may consider more liberal licensing. But bitching about how bad it is that they did this halfassed and 20 years too late isn't going to encourage their goodwill toward *us* in the future.
So I say -- hey, thanks, Microsoft, and please do it again when you get the chance.