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)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mvar on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:39PM
Releasing the source code for an OS which is deprecated since 1985 and under a restricting license is not enough to make you a respectable company. I can't understand why they just don't release the source for all Msdos versions under a GPL or similar license