Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft released the source code to Windows 98 OSR2, which is effectively abandonware as far as I understand, it would be great. A lot of multimedia applications and old games would instantly become easier to preserve.

Is there still any value for Microsoft in Win9x?

View on HN

Why not XP? The have no interest in supporting it. And millions of people still want to use it.

Because this would allow these millions of people to continue using this fork of XP rather than eventually buying a MS operating system.

But this is the attitude Microsoft needs to eliminate. The days of making money on operating systems is rapidly fading away. They already gave away Windows 8.1 as a free upgrade, so they're aware of it.

An open source XP would get many hackers interested in Windows, something they desperately need.

Citation needed.

They are definitely making money on closed-source operating systems and operating system tools:

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...

Umm, I don't buy Apple computers for their backlit keyboards...

> They already gave away Windows 8.1 as a free upgrade

It wasn't free--it took a couple of hours of my time!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com