DesqView/X: Night of the Living Dead Codebases

Pazuzues writes "I found something that you could say peaked my interest. It seems Symantec (purchasers of former company Quarterdeck) has release DeskView/X into public domain and can be downloaded now. DesqView/X was a GUI and OS extender that installed into DOS very much like MS Windows does. This little GUI can run X-Windows and MS Windows 3.x software and can even gateway serve MS Windows applications to remote X terminals. It was way ahead of its time and is a pretty decent toy to play with if you have a old 486 laying around. Anyways there is a petition being started that is petitioning Symantec to release the source code as OpenSource. I think this is a really good idea and could possiably help alot of other existing projects like WINE for example. It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"

Comments

Is this that important?

[willybur]

Is it really as useful as people think? If its abandonware, then it has fallen so out of date that there is no point in keeping it hidden. Why would Borland release Turbo Pascal 5.5 and Turbo C(++?) 1.01 into the public domain when the "newer" (but still really old) versions of those apps are still private? Because the old ones have lost so much functionality relatively.

Ancient X apps and Windows 3.1 applications? That's great if you're still coding in outdated setups. Current standards seem much more complex, open-ended and harder to emulate. Wine is probably not perfect for a reason.