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? _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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