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Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
MS OSes will be unsupported:
:-)
MS DOS x.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 3.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 95 (November 30, 2001)
Windows NT 3.5x (December 31, 2001)
Windows 98/98 SE (June 30, 2003)
Windows NT 4.xx (June 30, 2003)
Anyone else find it odd that MS will be supporting DOS, Win 3.x and NT 3.5 a month longer than 95? I mean, seriously. I can count the number of people I know that have win 3.x system on one hand.
I only wish I could do that for people who use 95.
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
There is no legal definition of abandonware (nor any legal concept of it).
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware and whether it's legally okay to trade it/hack it/despoil it in general?
Copyright does not require support of the copyrighted work.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Yes. SPA and other copyright enforcement goons still catalog and penalize illegal copies of MS-DOS.
If not, will that make Win95 sort of a free-for-all too?
No.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Even with corporate edition there is no guarantee there is no spyware stuff going on. I for fun did a corp ed. install somewhere behind a NATed private network. I logged all attempts by the installing computer to contact any machine on MSes subnet, and guess what, there were about 12 connection attempts throughout the install process, about 8 of which had no warning nor rationale, the others were along the lines of "testing your network connectivity".
I really ought to more officially document it, including tcpdumps of whatever the system is sending to MS and what is in the response, if any, from MS. Just because you aren't sending in for Product Activation doesn't mean it's not spyware. Also, I re-installed the OS later after formatting and both logged and blocked to see if it changed the install at all, and the install performed almost exactly as it had before, except a bit slower in places where it would timeout on a connection and try another IP until the list of IPs was exhausted. So the net connects don't seem to positively affect the install whatsoever.
Don't believe me? Try the experiment for yourself. Being a sys-admin I can toy around with the company firewall and license, but at home you can set up something similar.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.