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Comment by jeffwilcox | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the suggestion. We do have a "MicrosoftArchive" organization that we could consider transferring this sort of thing to...

As far as games, and the broader collection of earlier closed source applications: it's incredibly difficult to clear rights if there's third-party intellectual property that was written without the intention of being open, or licensed content, etc. It also takes a bit of an army to clean/review code and comments to get them ready.

[Source: I run our open source office... we help advise internally, but aren't staffed to do nostalgia open sourcing and so need to partner with people and teams who can help]

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If you're not able to do large projects easily due to licensing conflicts, I would focus on small, -mostly- self contained ones in the meantime. A couple of nice, high sentimental value suggestions here (IMO) would be MASM, the Windows XP version of Paint, MS Comic Chat (to the extent that it doesn't pull in IE stuff that MS would rather keep internal), and maybe some of the stuff off the first entertainment pack (not in licensing hell like Tetris) or builtin games for Windows? I could see Reversi being a big hit. Also freeing the subset of the Core Fonts for the Web you're able to, at least Comic Sans MS.

Also relatedly to the idea of doing source releases, it may be worth looking into doing officially blessed public -binary- releases of old Microsoft software. I'd imagine it would be at least somewhat easier to get past legal and would enable the masses of unwashed zoomers to experience gems like QuickBasic, early Windows and DOS versions, everything released for CP/M, and some products that MS acquired and subsequently buried and took the hatchet to, like Altamira Composer. Actually, on that note, a source release for Altamira Composer or MS Image Composer would also be really nice if it was in fact practicable.

I was sort of frustrated that while the source exists for 2.11 now, it doesn't quite build right out of the box into a free-standing disc image-- I think it was missing some data needed to build either MSDOS.SYS or IO.SYS. Once you have all the files, you still need a chicken and egg process to get to a bootable disc, not just a 360k image you can write to a floppy.

MASM is still shipping and being used, so hardly a candidate.

It would be neat if Windows 3.x could get open sourced, both the NT and non-NT versions.

There's probably a business argument that they're far enough removed from Windows 11 to not be a threat to Microsoft's sale of Windows 11.

Isn't Windows itself far enough removed to not be a threat to Microsoft's bottom line these days? Wouldn't be surprised to see modern Windows going open-source or at least source-available in the coming decade.

Yeah Im surprised windows 11 isn’t open source at this point

Even presuming the will existed in Microsoft, there's enough licensed code that open sourcing it as is would probably be a non starter. Probably a more viable approach would be open sourcing individual components as the rights are cleared and eventually replacing the third party components which aren't able to be renegotiated with freely available or internally built replacements. That being said, they -might- be able to free something like WRK with only a little prodding on legal's part, and that would be interesting in itself bc NT has a quite elegant internal architecture and not too many people get to see it overall.

> there's enough licensed code that open sourcing it as is would probably be a non starter.

This is exactly what Sun wrote the CDDL for; it let them open source as many components as possible while still leaving some pieces closed. Sun also ended up releasing a bundle of binaries that you drop into a source build to get a complete /functional OpenSolaris system with the still-needed closed bits included, and over time some of those components got replaced piecemeal with FOSS alternatives (although illumos still includes some closed parts AFAIK).

That's right, I definitely had the ordeal of freeing Solaris in mind when I was writing the comment. Honestly something of a minor miracle it even happened. (also I'm pretty sure all the closed stuff got purged out of illumos?, not even using Sun compilers now, it's all gcc/binutils)

> That's right, I definitely had the ordeal of freeing Solaris in mind when I was writing the comment. Honestly something of a minor miracle it even happened.

Good to keep the successes in mind:)

> also I'm pretty sure all the closed stuff got purged out of illumos?, not even using Sun compilers now, it's all gcc/binutils

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close... seems to say there's still some blobs in there, and gcc is a patched version. That said, yes, AIUI it's gotten better.

At this point I'll take a version of Windows X (whatever the latest is when you read this, now or ten years from now) that has all the bloat removed, or is easily removable, no ads of any kind for any Microsoft apps or services, call it Windows for Professionals, or Windows for Devs. Whatever, add a +$200 price tag to it, and I'll pay you Microsoft more money, to maintain less software (since you'd have to remove more OS specific things), just guarantee LTS for 20 years after release. No forced updates, but updates should be on a predictable schedule and security updates should be highlighted as such.

I'd add OS/2 1.x to this list of requests.

Thanks for that response!

I am just glad Microsoft embraced open source and is even willing to open source some of their old tools. I fully understand... Sometimes people leave undesirable comments (swear words and curses for whoever breaks it, and so on...) so I appreciate anything you guys do. One of my secret hopes is someday I come on HN to find out that some if not all of Visual Basic 6 has been open sourced, that way I can always install it without having to sail the seven seas (an option I don't bother with anymore...) or trying to figure out where my old license key even went.

Quick question if you don't mind answering: Does Microsoft have a team that is devoted to just that full time? I'm assuming it would be your team, but is that essentially all or most of what your team works on?

I am not saying to stop sending some emails around and try to acquire third party IP permissions, but perhaps a contact to the IP rights might come out of the woodwork and speed up the processes if you release what you can while you are waiting.

Since this is mostly for historical interest, note what the IP is and what they do, for libraries, perhaps somebody will find a substitute or a version of library with similar functionality without the limitation. For images/sound just include blank ones of the proper dimensions/length and the same filename, if there is enough interest they can be remade.

Just to give you an idea of of the lengths preservationists are willing to go, people in the retroreversing community they are spending months to years converting by hand opcodes of binaries to annotated assembly or C code that compiles byte identically, a few non included IP bits shouldn't be much of a blocker to retro enthusiasts.

I'd love to see MS DOS 6.22 out into the world at some point if you can swing it!

Licensing issues would probably prevent this from happening, I can't comment on third party code from other sources, but rather famously, Microsoft got in trouble for disk compression code in the 6.x releases and had to substitute it later on. Personally, I would like to see one of the very late PC-DOS releases freed (7.1 or so), but considering IBM's indifferent to belligerent attitude on freeing their historical software, I don't see this happening any time soon.

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