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>This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
And not to be confused with its plural form "opera".
Also, a direct cognate with "operate", "operation", etc.
>This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
High five for anyone who still remembers the brief Bill the Gates arc in the comic or the Banana Computer parody ad of Apple starring Gene Simmons (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-banana-junior-6000-comp... , about halfway down the page).
how complicated would a port to linux be ?
edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that don't work...
(That it was able to build and run at all with just a few prompts is a HFS moment, though!)
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We should care about Microsoft's licenses exactly as much as Microsoft cares about ours.
Only if you have a lawyer department as large as theirs. But to be fair/realistic, as an individual, I've never worried about their licenses (for myself, my friends, and family). The only time I did was when installing their software in professional/commercial contexts, that's where they do most of their enforcement as far as I know... and only when the scale is egregious.
how complicated would a port to linux be ?
I prompted Claude Opus 5 (I don't really have the Fable tokens to spare) to do just that (via winelib). It's gotten to the point where it opens, runs for three seconds, and abruptly exits. edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that d…
Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...
Back in '85-6 I developed training for USDA (using Dan Bricklin's Demo) for a curses version of Word 5 that ran on 3B2s with SysV v2. I'd be very happy to see that ported to Linux or one of the BSDs. In fact, I'd love to see both Word and Excel '98 on one of my workstations. IMHO things went South after that. I had to use Windows and Office off and on with clients up to 2010 and I'm sure that Excel provided some impo…
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There are pics from the developer in this article (not sure why he neglected them in the README): https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...
Wow, it really looks like Win 10/11. Microsoft is back to the roots now. But Word 1.0 even has 3d GUI elements. They must have had impressive computers back then.
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A native Linux application would be preferable, even if it does work with WINE (which I don't know... yet).
Win32 is Linux's only stable ABI.
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The point of open source is to address and concerns around copyright. And this source is not open source by the definition most people use when they refer to “open source”. It’s still proprietary but source available. However I will say, this source is unlikely to be useful to anyone beyond academic curiosity. So for the purposes of this project, the source license is “good enough”.
More concretely, Microsoft's license [0] gives you at most one of the four essential freedoms: 0. Freedom to run for any purpose? No. 1. Freedom to modify the program? Maybe; Microsoft can revoke it without cause at any time. 2. Freedom to distribute unmodified? No. 3. Freedom to distribute modified? No. I'm using the free software definition [1] because it's simpler and clearer than the open source definition [2], w…