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Comment by larsrc | Hacker News Reader

"Donates"? A code base is a maintenance burden.

That’s the old code base which has been in maintenance mode for 5 years and which Microsoft doesn’t want to maintain anymore. New development still happen in a fork which remains under the stewardship of Microsoft.

Second paragraph of the article by the way, just saying.

So Microsoft gave the Wine project the software equivalent of a stained mattress?

The Wine project apparently decided they wanted to keep alive an old version of a piece of software Microsoft has no interest in and Microsoft gave them the official repo instead of throwing it out.

Mostly interesting in that it is a token of goodwill from Microsoft to Wine something which is in line with the current Microsoft view of the OS market but would have been very surprising not that long ago.

It's not like Microsoft can force Wine to take the codebase. In order for this to be donated, the Wine project needed to accept it.

Pretty much, by the look of it. But we still don’t know everything or what exactly the Wine project has on its metaphorical mind.

Feel free to donate me a 90s Honda Civic

Yeah if this doesn't come with a substantial endowment it's not a donation.

So ...throwing it over the fence into the neighbor's yard, then?

More like going to the local library with a bunch of old books. It might be worth keeping them, but someone has to sort them out.

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