141–150 of 211 posts
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).
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It's sometimes hard to believe, but our current laws seems to allow that you can be forbidden from modifying a piece of software even for your own personal use.
Even more interesting: copyright laws seems to indicate that playing/singing a song that someone else wrote, even in the shower, may be infringement.
Unless your shower is located on a stage and you charge admission for people to listen to you sing in the shower, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.
What is funny is that MS-DOS 6.0 source code had already been leaked. Granting permission to IBM to make OS/2 source code available would be nice too BTW.
MS-DOS 2.x is not so interesting in comparison.
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.
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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…
And if I want to run a TOS (Tape Operating System), how should I call it? The naming is correct and comes from IBM mainframe operating systems from the 60's.
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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
You may use, copy, reproduce, and distribute this Software for any non-commercial purpose
you may create derivative works of such portions of the Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes
You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works.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.
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How can a license allow modification without redistribution?
So you can't publish a modified version. But can you publish a diff, which someone could use to recreate your modified version?
That's not going to be the case here as the code is too old to be patent encumbered.
Things are certainly moving towards there being a wide definition of contributory copyright infringement, eg cases against torrent file sites that don't store copyright works. It would be pretty asinine and regressive to punish someone for publishing instruction on a copyright work could be modified, IMO, but the law isn't known for always making sense.
https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Copyright:_Infringement_Issues...