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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

#131

Post by jon-wood »

Jtsummers wrote: post #110
tanzam75 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Under Windows, including the most recent versions, you can get repeatable results for procedures that involve peripherals only if you disconnect them all, then reconnect them in the same order each and every time. Why? Drive letters. So don't use drive letters. Mount each volume in its own separate NTFS folder. Now you'll get repeatable results no matter what order you plug them in.

As someone very unfamiliar with Windows administration anymore, how would you do this without invoking 3rd party tools? Found MS's description [1]. However, that's not useable by most office workers, and the steps are likely beyond the average home user. So it's really just a feature for power users and IT departments. [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx

Who are probably the only people it matters to, so I'm not sure it's worth getting too worried about.

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

#132

Post by anon4 »

profquail wrote: post #96
Rovanion wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a 503 on that link sadly.

It's the Microsoft Research License Agreement (MSR-LA). MSR-LA text from another project: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/msr-la.txt

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 touch this with a ten-foot-pole, the pole now belongs to Microsoft, along with your arm and anybody standing too close to you. You also lose the right to use your arm to sell things.

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

#133

Post by whoopdedo »

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…

And to this day we're still barred from creating files or directories named CON, PRN, NUL ... Damn you, IBM

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

#134

Post by publicfig »

bdg wrote: post #104

Not having an ability to view the source online was driving me insane. Hopefully I scratched your itch too. https://github.com/Incognito/msdos

Just so you're aware, I'm not positive that this is allowed under the Microsoft Research License.

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

#135

Post by rbanffy »

anon4 wrote: post #132
profquail wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Microsoft Research License Agreement (MSR-LA). MSR-LA text from another project: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/msr-la.txt

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.

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

#136

Post by Theodores »

ct1 wrote: post #44
RyanZAG wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are you not allowed to distribute it by the license, actually distributing it would get you sued for patent violation. Using anything you find in the code will probably get you sued for patent violation, too. EDIT: I can just imagine a future lawsuit: A: Did you read the MS-DOS source code released by Microsoft on XX? We have logs to show you downloaded it. B: Yes, but that has nothing to do with this lawsui…

MS-DOS is maybe the ugliest operating system I ever had the displeasure of using. There's very little to learn from operating system design point of view in there, and better sources are available under more permissive licenses -- ie open source licenses. It looks like a PR stunt to me.

'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't run cron jobs and the list goes on. All of this normal stuff that an Operating System does was well established on UNIX boxes, VAXes and, to a certain extent, on the BBC Micro.

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

#137

Post by justin66 »

ptx wrote: post #117
justin66 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it will nevertheless be under copyright until long after we're all dead, so if you read it Microsoft could presumably still decide to sue you for copyright infringement if that ever happens to seem advantageous for them. You'd have to actually, you know, infringe their copyrights. It's hard to know if you're one of the many who are confused about copyright, patent, and trademark but just reading the code doesn'…

Couldn't they pick any piece of code you write that happens to looks similar to some piece of code in MS-DOS and argue that it is in fact derived from their code, if it's known that you previously read the MS-DOS code? Sort of like the "rangeCheck" portion of the Google v. Oracle case. With patents it doesn't matter whether you read their code or not: you're screwed in any case. But with copyright the history of the…

> Couldn't they pick any piece of code you write that happens to looks similar to some piece of code in MS-DOS and argue that it is in fact derived from their code, if it's known that you previously read the MS-DOS code?

You write a lot of MASM code, such that this is actually a risk for you?

Maybe it's possible? I'm not a lawyer but I think at some point early in the process, in order to move forward, they'd have to convince a judge that they'd suffered damages as a result of your use of a few lines of their ancient MASM code. I assume that's where the whole thing would be met with laughter unless, of course, you've got some truly cunning thing you're going to do with DOS assembly code and make a million.

All that is before anyone needs to even consider whether the code you borrowed is trivial in nature such that it's protectable or not protectable via copyright.

One of the lessons of the Google v. Oracle case: Oracle didn't actually win anything in damages.

> With patents it doesn't matter whether you read their code or not: you're screwed in any case.

Okay, forget the rest and focus on this: you need to familiarize yourself with the concepts of willful infringement and treble damages. Unlike the rest of the stuff we're talking about, it actually matters and is not pure paranoia.

If you violate a patent - and realistically, all of us who write any software are violating someone's patent - you'd better hope you can convince a court that you did not do so knowingly. How do you do this? Make an effort not to read any patents, ever. Plausible deniability.

Whether the code you've read is patented or not is actually trivia. Whether you knew it was covered by a specific patent is important.

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

#138

Post by Jtsummers »

jon-wood wrote: post #131
Jtsummers wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone very unfamiliar with Windows administration anymore, how would you do this without invoking 3rd party tools? Found MS's description [1]. However, that's not useable by most office workers, and the steps are likely beyond the average home user. So it's really just a feature for power users and IT departments. [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx

Who are probably the only people it matters to, so I'm not sure it's worth getting too worried about.

Eh, I use Linux and OS X at home. I only use Windows at work so it doesn't bother me (but I do get annoyed a bit when drives don't get mounted to the same letter, even when it's the next available one). That said, it would have saved me a lot of heartache a few years back dealing with some testing tools that liked to hardcode paths and threw a fit when things didn't line up correctly.

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

#139

Post by anigbrowl »

rbanffy wrote: post #127
derefr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important question, I think, is: can the FreeDOS folks read the MS-DOS source, and then continue to work on FreeDOS?

It's safer if they don't. Unless Microsoft licenses it under a license with the most explicit and extensive protections against patent lawsuits.

Utility patents only last 20 years. MS-DOS 2.0 was published in 1983, which is 31 years ago. So, while it's copyrighted and you can't redistribute the code or the compiled binary, you can go to town with the algorithms, should you want to.

As a bonus, the availability of this code might make prior art challenges to extant patents much easier.

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

#140

Post by userbinator »

Theodores wrote: post #136
ct1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS-DOS is maybe the ugliest operating system I ever had the displeasure of using. There's very little to learn from operating system design point of view in there, and better sources are available under more permissive licenses -- ie open source licenses. It looks like a PR stunt to me.

'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 still more than some embedded OSs which are not much more than a threading library.

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