Microsoft Open-Sources MS-DOS 4.0 Under MIT License

[dragorth]

If IBM and M$ are willing to team up for releasing MS-DOS's source, then why not for OS/2?

IBM sold it OS/2 IP to another company that AFAIK still sells it.

[cutterjohn]

seems irrelevant in the era of freedos TBH... everything works under that that Ive needed to work...

[EDIT]

NOW IF they would OSS windows that MIGHT be different... although TBH I really don't need windows much other than the windows drovers for my Intel ARC are better than even the bleeding edge linux drivers, plus the bleeding edge llinux drivers remove features like HW video encoding... not good bob...

[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]

IOW I find MS releases of 'DOS' to be nothing more than historical artifacts...

[/EDIT2]

[avis]

So sad that it’s this crap that took over the operating system market…

That crap has provided stable user space API/ABI for close to 30 years now, stable kernel API/ABI for over a decade, backward and forward compatibly and all these things are basically swear words in tens of thousands of incompatible Linux OSes/distros.

People use windows not because Microsoft has got a monopoly on the desktop, it's because with windows you know your applications and games will work.

And OEMs still don't support Linux with drivers properly.

[nickbailuc]

afaik DOS 4.0 is the minimum version required to run DOOM

[Nocturnal64]

That crap had provided stable user space API/ABI for close to 30 years now, stable kernel API/ABI for over a decade, backward and forward compatibly and all these things are basically swear words in tens of thousands of incompatible Linux OSes/distros.

People use windows not because Microsoft has got a monopoly on the desktop, it's because with windows you know your applications and games will work.

Bullshit. For example, all the Games for Windows games stopped working many years ago. They even won’t work anymore if you install the legacy Windows of the era. And software like ClassicShell (which provides a sane, ad-free start menu) might stop working even within the lifecycle of the given Windows version.

[edit] Also, most of the games I purchased in the past, tend to work better on Linux than on Windows nowadays…

[pong]

Wouldn’t it make more sense to release the last version? It’s not like people won’t buy Windows 11 because they get MSDOS for free…

Hmm don't be so sure. I recall being much happier about the prospect of buying the former than having the latter inflicted upon me in any capacity.

[pong]

I doubt it very much, Dosbox is already way ahead of this. MS doesn't open source anything until its worthless. The worth to them is just saying they did.

Perhaps the "open source" in there is superfluous?

[pong]

So sad that it’s this crap that took over the operating system market…

Yep. If only we'd had RSTS, RSX, MicroVMS, but at least we got BSD / LINUX and kinda-sorta Solaris.

Actually it's really sad from a purely historical / e-archaeology perspective that all the old 1940s-1970 or whatever level stuff didn't get opened up, made free from the LOC / Smithsonian / something. Probably so much stuff is just GONE with only fragments surviving at the deepest levels of landfills somewhere.

[pong]

After open-sourcing Paint and Windows Calculator, we have another tremendous contribution of MS to the open-source community. MS <3 opensource </sarcasm>

At this rate, we may see the open-sourcing of MS Minesweeper before the turn of this century.

Oh pray do not besmirch the illusion of MS' generosity. Why I'll have you know just this week, in their infinite noblesse oblige, they open-accessed their shiny new WizardLM-2 ML model for at least oh a whole 30 minutes before they nuked its repos, salted the earth over them, and disclaimed / destroyed all trace of its existence.

I think it was under the MOAFL -- Microsoft Open-April Fools License.

[bezirg]

That crap had provided stable user space API/ABI for close to 30 years now, stable kernel API/ABI for over a decade, backward and forward compatibly and all these things are basically swear words in tens of thousands of incompatible Linux OSes/distros.

People use windows not because Microsoft has got a monopoly on the desktop, it's because with windows you know your applications and games will work.

And OEMs still don't support Linux with drivers properly.

This is not correct. Do you actually know that there are gamers that want to play older games (for nostalgia or other reasons) and they resort to Linux+Wine because these old games do not run at all on Windows 8/10/11?