![]() There were only a handful of senior engineers who could, or even dared, to make any changes to this huge lump of critical code, both performance-critical but also vital to data integrity. When they revealed this and were told that it was impossible, they responded that they did not know that it was impossible so they just did it anyway. Indeed it is possible that it was machine-generated assembly: Novell ported Netware from its original 68000 architecture to 80286 by writing a compiler that compiled 68000 assembler into 80286 object code. The original Netware Filesystem was apparently an approximately half megabyte single source file in x86 assembly. Whereas Novell Netware 5 and 6 introduced new filesystems – which lacked the blazing, industry-beating performance of the filesystem of Netware 2/3/4 – not because the source was lost, but because nobody could maintain it any more. I think WordPad happened because the source to Windows Write was lost. How about asking for that just as freeware? Or even their other DOS apps, such as Multiplan and Chart? How about VB for DOS, or the Quick* compilers? It’s a 100% freeware download now, made so as a Y2K fix.īut the last ever DOS version was MS Word for DOS 6, which is a much nicer app all round. The question becomes not “why doesn’t this happen?” but the far more productive “well what else could this happen to?”įor instance, I have MS Word for DOS 5.5 here. So, for example, we can usefully talk about things like MS-DOS, which is relatively tiny and which contains very little licensed code – for instance, the antivirus and backup tools in some later versions – and which could easily be excised with zero functional impact. So I submit that it’s more important to ask if there’s anything that people can do in order to help it happen more often, rather than discuss why it doesn’t happen. Well, yes, but… here we are, discussing a fairly substantial app which they just did precisely this to. Especially Workplace OS/2 (the PowerPC version) as there should be little to no MS code in that. ![]() ![]() Win9x source code would really help ReactOS and I suspect MS is scared of that, too. But I bet some of the codebase is still used, especially UI stuff, and some doesn’t belong to them. Win9x is equally dead, with no new releases in over 20 years. I suspect they are ashamed of some of it. It would help FreeDOS and maybe even an update to DR-DOS. If MS were serious about FOSS, they could release DOS without any impact on current Windows.ĭOS doesn’t have media playback or anything. I think this is a key point, and a key confession.Īll versions of MS-DOS are long dead, and the last release of the last branch, IBM PC DOS 7.1 (no, not 7.01) was 2003:
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