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Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

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Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#152

Post by btown »

rbanffy wrote: post #135
anon4 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, so reading it closely, it's kind of like the GPL in that any derivative work is licensed under the same license, but unlike the GPL, Microsoft get full rights to any modifications you make and any comments you make, including if you send them mail marked "confidential", plus you cannot sue anybody using this software for patent infringement if you discovered it via reading the source code. Basically, if you…

So, answering the question opened in another thread, if FreeDOS developers read the code, they risk making Microsoft the owner of their future contributions.

> You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, distributing the Software for use with commercial products, using the Software in the creation or use of commercial products or any other activity which purpose is to procure a commercial gain to you or others.

If you're in academia and getting a stipend and you look at it as part of your research, Microsoft could argue that that is a commercial gain to you. If FreeDOS has ever been used to make a commercial product (this is very different from the GPL which explicitly delineates derivative works from works produced by the software!), then its developers risk breaking the terms of the license agreement if they taint their thought processes with Microsoft's code. So yes, I'd probably say you're right.

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#154

Post by dalke »

tanzam75 wrote: post #61
voidlogic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't patents only last 15-20 years?

Right, any patents from 1983 and 1991 have expired. Besides which, I don't think Microsoft had any patents in 1983. P.S. Google Patents is useless for answering this question. "Referenced by" is included in the search, so any patent from 1983 that is ever referenced by a Microsoft patent (from any year) shows up in the results.

Nope, none in 1983.

I did an advanced search at USPTO for "AN/microsoft and ISD/19750101->19890101" (patents assigned to Microsoft and issued between 1975 and 1989). All it found were:

4,779,187 - Method and operating system for executing programs in a multi-mode microprocessor (filed April 10, 1985, issued October 18, 1988)

4,588,074 - Holder for storing and supporting articles (filed March 21, 1985, issued May 13, 1986)

Yes, if I understand it correctly, Microsoft's first patent was "relates to article holders, and more particularly to a dual purpose holder for both storing, and supporting in open position, books, magazines, pamphlets, and similar items."

I can't figure out why 5,848,246 (Sun Microsystems, Inc.: Object-oriented system, method and article of manufacture for a client-server session manager in an interprise [sic] computing framework system) references this patent.

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#155

Post by quasque »

mato wrote: post #121

This tidbit from the DOS 2.0 README.txt (section 5) is fascinating: The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-" as the switch character. For transporting of batch files across machines, Mi…

It's interesting to see the real specification for this system call, as only the device availability subfunctions were widely known outside of Microsoft [1].

I wonder if many other hidden or deprecated functions are present in these releases.

[1] http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/65/27.html

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#156

Post by wtallis »

userbinator wrote: post #140
Theodores wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Operating system' is stretching it. 'Disk Operating System' is one of those phrases like 'ice creme' that implies 'ice cream'. MS-DOS was a program that wrote stuff to disk for you, read the keyboard for you, listened to interrupts for things and showed useful error messages such as 'Retry, Fail or Abort?'. There was no networking to speak of, certainly not TCP/IP as we know it, no user permission things, you couldn…

An OS doesn't need to have networking, permissions, or anything else. It just needs to provide a common set of services for applications programs to use. Consider that OSs started out as libraries of functions that programs could call into, which then evolved into job managers, that is where MS-DOS fits. It's single-tasking, single-address-space, but it already has the concept of processes, drivers, files. This is st…

Really though, wasn't most of DOS just thin abstractions on BIOS interfaces? What hardware abstractions did it provide other than the filesystem, and what services other than an ABI allowing you to quit a program without rebooting?

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#157

Post by INTPenis »

DanBC wrote: post #153

My "Future Computers MSDOS 2" manual finally has a use! http://imgur.com/ejnlHY1 http://imgur.com/7NzGGWO http://imgur.com/ljOV7XJ

Manuals were just so awesome in those days. Here's my favorite from when I was a kid.

http://imgur.com/aTn6wVh,ry3LXlb

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#158

Post by steven_pack »

Fascinating. Now THIS is a museum.

There was obviously scope for personality in the commenting...

  arena_free_next:
    CMP     BYTE PTR DS:[DI],arena_signature_end
                                        ; end of road, Jack?    
    retz                            ; never come back no more
    CALL    arena_next              ; next item in ES/AX carry set if tras
And a nice reminder of the other big players of the day:

  IF      WANG                    ;Are we assembling for WANG?

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#159

Post by Tloewald »

yuhong wrote: post #141
Tloewald wrote: post #58

Maybe someone will produce a version of Word for Windows 1.1a that runs on a modern OS, and I'll be able to open and edit documents that have been impossible to open in later versions of Word (of course Word for Windows 2.0 would open the document, convert it to its new format in place, and then crash, so I'd need to find un-borked versions of the documents first).

I don't believe Word for Windows actually writes to the file until you save it.

If I recall correctly, Word for Windows 2 had autosave on by default, and would corrupt Word for Windows files with embedded drawings so that they became impossible to edit. (Experienced with several files at the time.)

Re: Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public

#160

Post by akira2501 »

bovermyer wrote: post #144

I think a lot of people here are missing the point of this. Microsoft didn't release the source code for these old versions of their software so people could use it, hack on it, and make new versions. They released it because it's historically interesting. As someone who is both a developer and a history graduate, I think it's fascinating.

The fact that this was released to the "Computer History Museum" was apparently missed or not understood by the majority of the audience.
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