Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.technet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 211 posts

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

#171

Post by bdg »

habith wrote: post #129
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

Third bullet point in the license you presumably agreed to before downloading the source code: - You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works. I'm not saying it's a good license, but if you do not agree with or at least intend to follow it then perhaps you should have not downloaded it to begin with.

I'm reasonably sure I violated 10 laws since I woke up.

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

#172

Post by bdg »

publicfig wrote: post #134
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.

Thanks for the tip. I solved the problem forever by deleting the open source code from the Internet.

Bang up job by MS legal on this one. I'm confident this will prevent other distributions of this software.

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

#173

Post by ekianjo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #139
rbanffy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).

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

#174

Post by lugg »

ekianjo wrote: post #173
anigbrowl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).

I couldn't find the answer but did come across this interesting historical take on software patents.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/24/business/microsoft-loses-c...

> The Patents and Trademark Office, which began issuing software patents only a decade ago, has been accused of having inadequate expertise in software to judge what is truly novel.

Nice to know nothing has changed in a decade.

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

#175

Post by bunderbunder »

ekianjo wrote: post #173
anigbrowl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).

Oldest patent I see that looks like it could be for MS-DOS is #4,779,187, "Method and operating system for executing programs in a multi-mode microprocessor", which was issued in October 1988. That wouldn't apply to DOS 2.0, of course.

The bigger concern would be copyright. That might be a fairly plausible argument for why FreeDOS developers shouldn't be reading this source. Though realistically the odds that Microsoft would actually pursue such a case are remote at best.

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

#176

Post by rspeer »

lugg wrote: post #174
ekianjo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).

I couldn't find the answer but did come across this interesting historical take on software patents. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/24/business/microsoft-loses-c... > The Patents and Trademark Office, which began issuing software patents only a decade ago, has been accused of having inadequate expertise in software to judge what is truly novel. Nice to know nothing has changed in a decade.

Two decades, even.

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

#177

Post by userbinator »

wtallis wrote: post #156
userbinator wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_API

Given that it was a disk operating system it's no surprise that the bulk of the services are disk/filesystem-related, but it also has ones for I/O, memory, timing, and processes.

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

#178

Post by mschaef »

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…

Larry Osterman (a long time MS engineer) wrote about this at some length here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432...

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

#179

Post by rbanffy »

bunderbunder wrote: post #175
ekianjo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).

Oldest patent I see that looks like it could be for MS-DOS is #4,779,187, "Method and operating system for executing programs in a multi-mode microprocessor", which was issued in October 1988. That wouldn't apply to DOS 2.0, of course. The bigger concern would be copyright. That might be a fairly plausible argument for why FreeDOS developers shouldn't be reading this source. Though realistically the odds that Microso…

Issue date is not the only relevant date - patents get extensions and expand in scope. I would imagine the FAT patent that Microsoft uses to get some revenue from every SD card sold comes from the dawn of personal computing.
Post reply on HN