Note: it will still work, it's just not supported anymore.
It's sad that such discontinuations don't come with an open-sourcing to allow community based support if need be.
It's sad that such discontinuations don't come with an open-sourcing to allow community based support if need be.
It's really hard to see how that would work. Most non trivial systems unwrapping the licensing etc. alone would be a huge job, let along disentangling from codebase used for other things, etc.
Even though in paper Windows CE's and Android/Linux licensing could not be more different, they are in practice more similar than one would think. You'd get the source, you'd make your modifications, and you'd (not be allowed to|get away with) not redistribute the source.
At least where I work, my software is basically 100% backed by open-source software. If the company wanted to, some of our larger and more complex systems would be trivial to open source as the only proprietary software they use is our own.
For an OS, I could see there being issues around drivers. However, it seems like the actual core of the OS would be pretty trivial to open source.
Sure is. Microsoft works with thousands of vendors every year. There are lots of different terms under which they license software. It would not be that unusual for a game or utility or promotional item to be licensed for a version or so, and nothing after that. Very often these vendors vanish into the ether, and cannot be tracked down for any purpose at all, much less asking them to open source their software. Then, if you tried to ask them to open source, they might mistakenly see dollar signs and try to get money out of Microsoft when none is forthcoming.
This is a cart before the horse thing. How MS licenses software in the past has no bearing on adding a new open source license.
The only time this would be a problem is distributing 3rd party source code. Which, AFAIK (and this is windows we are talking about) pretty much only happens in the drivers.
Windows CE didn't come bundled with steam or really hardly anything. That was sort of the point of CE is it had almost nothing on it.
But I've gathered from open sourcing discussions, that it's pretty common for closed source software to license libraries and other bits and bobs from other closed source vendors. Especially closed source software from long ago, when there was less to take from open source.
EULAs are obviously bogus though, yeah.
Also, EULAs are only enforceable due to the fiction that running software without accepting one is a breach of copyright. Without copyright, EULAs are pointless, and anyone can write and distribute tiny programs to patch out EULA acceptance screens or license key verifiers, because copyright law won't prevent them from doing so. Get rid of copyright, get rid of EULAs.
Large tech companies all try to pass as green nowadays, yet consider the waste that throwing away code that would likely interest others represents - even after two decades of service.