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MS To Finally End OEM Licensing For Windows 3.11
halfEvilTech writes with an excerpt from Ars Technica's story on the sputtering out of Windows for Workgroups 3.11: "Believe it or not, that headline is not a typo. John Coyne, Systems Engineer in the OEM Embedded Devices group at Microsoft, has posted a quick blog entry that broke the bad news: as of November 1, 2008, Microsoft will no longer allow OEMs to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. That's exactly 15 years after it shipped in November 1993! Poor OEMs have so much to put up with these days; first Windows XP, and now this!"
The story's a bit amusing, but for me it does raise kind of a serious question. Maybe slightly OT, but I've always wondered why it is that abandonware doesn't automatically become public domain. Many people were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon. Seems to me it would be a fair enough rule that software with a sizeable installed base that is abandoned by its creators should be opened to the community, so it can live on or die on its own merits. Personally, I'd love to see what the community might have made of the old Apple UNIX, and even Win2K and XP might be made into something really cool with a community-based effort.
Caveat Utilitor
And I really wanted a copy on my new dell.
And nothing of value was lost.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
This news doesn't bode well for Windows 95...
All yer Winders are belongs to usses.
A slashdot article without a typo? Can't half that!
Thank God for evolution.
I found 3 boxes I had from way back... 2 Windows 3.1 boxes one still unopened and in mint condition. and one box to upgrade from dos to windows 3.1. Maybe there will finally be a market to sell these and make a few bucks, or hell maybe even use the opened one.
Look Microsoft, you don't know what it's like - I'm the one out there every day putting my ass on the line. And I'm not out of order! You're out of order! The whole freaking system is out of order! You want the truth? You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! 'Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your Windows 3.11 machine, you'll know what to do!! Forget it Microsoft, it's Chinatown!!!
...will my "Bob" license still be valid?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I recall when the original WfW packs hit the stores many years ago (was it CompUSA?). Software + NIC, IIRC.
At the time, I was running LANtastic, a terrible networking package. It was cheap, and handled my multinode BBS fairly well, but it was REALLY proprietary and sometimes had no reason to crash but did.
I sold my multinode BBS about that time when I first noticed WfW. Since I was a bit flush with cash after selling the old BBS, I decided to purchase a WfW "starter pack" of some sort. A few hours later, and it was up and running on my now-smaller home network.
At the time I was working for a Novell installation company, and I detested Novell's interface. WfW was significantly better, even though it wasn't as geek-friendly as Novell. I was not very *nix concerned at the time, either, but at that point I had over 9 years of PC experience.
For me, WfW really beat down what my old standards were. LANtastic was out. DESQview was a dying application. Novell was too expensive for the small networks, and too hard to administer for the basic admins at the clients I was handling at the time.
I recall clearly saying "This is going to sweep the PC world." And it did. It was the beginning of a much more profitable venture for me, personally, and provided the basis for many jobs of the geeks who circle at /.
So RIP WfW. It was nice knowing you.
I bet most of us can remember the day you loaded 3.11.... and said "you gotta be kidding me"!
If part of an industry is relying on something and it goes poof, it costs quite a bit of money to retool to accommodate such a radical change.
Also goes to show you that old isn't always 'bad'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
General Motors will no longer support the use of buggy whips on any of their new models.
I dont see what good either is doing MS anymore. They obviously aren't making a profit from either after 15 some years. Why dont they release the source code to the community?
If an OEM has purchased a pile of Windows 3.11 licenses from microsoft they can continue to sell it indefinitely...under the doctrine of first sale. So people who want windows 3.11 can license it until November 1st.
Admittedly Microsoft may stop the sale of NEW licenses which is what they are apparently are doing.
I suspect win 3.11 is licensed for POS devices and legacy applications. I guess all those people licensing that stuff will have to go to windows 95/98 embedded???
Now how am I supposed to finish debugging the expansion packs I've been developing for Civilization and Duke Nukem 3D?
This is an outrage! I'm switching to Linux only now! 3.1/3.11 were my first Windows OS back in 1994. I do hold a little nostalga for it still, though I always hated exiting to DOS to play doom.
After all, you could just drop back to DOS to do useful and fun things!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Contrast that to Win95. When it was discovered that there was a serious bug in Win95 that would crash the system after 40 days of operation, the reaction in many places, including here on Slashdot, was "You mean there are people who have actually kept Win95 running for 40 days?" I doubt that we will ever see products from Microsoft again that had the stability required for process control applications that existed in DOS and Win3.1 .
Of course, If they need it, many OEMs will simply keep shipping Win3.1 solutions, just not pay Microsoft. They may be putting themselves at quite a risk, but it sure would be an interesting lawsuit to see get to court. I would love to see how Microsoft reacts to the "We had to pirate the software to keep our company running and it's workers employed, because the newer Microsoft software is such crap" defense. Likely Microsoft would not, and would drop the suit.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I believe that software should be required to ship with buildable source if it is to qualify for copyright protection.
How would you build, say, a Wii game from source?
Aw man. Windows 3.11 was the best version of Windows. And I'm not kidding!
I wonder if it will still be available to MSDN subscribers.
(please feel free to ridicule the crap out of me if this was mentioned in TFA or on TFB)
I do have one nice thing to say about W3.11; if you can get it to run on anything about as or more modern then a PII it runs (and installs) really fast!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Just out of curiosity, if I did happen to be a guy selling 486s, would Microsoft have a Vista version that can run on it?
This is my sig.
Only the most hardcore used "Windows NT",
President Bush's popularity sank to new lows,
Afghanistan's ongoing collapse continued to somehow worsen,
A series of bomb blasts killed scores of people in India,
RMS insisted that Linux be called GNU/Linux and nobody cared,
MTV sucked ass,
The number of Americans incarcerated increased by between 300,000 and 700,000 a year...
I can see this as a niche product, one that fits perfectly.
Embedded controller. Low memory use. Weak (therefore cheap/easy on electricity) chip. Networkable, but no TCP/IP (no Internet can be good, i think our Canon copiers got the slammer worm a few years back).
Just because someone is using crappy hardware, it doesn't give you the right to use language like *that*.
Build it on a computer, burn to cd/dvd, done?
The Wii SDK with which retail games are built is not public. Nor is Nintendo's digital signing key for executables that run on retail Wii consoles.
Around the time that people were developing new software for Windows 3.11 they had the option of using smaller, faster, and less power-hungry operating systems like OS/9 (which had recently been re-released as OS/9000 but is now OS/9 again) and QNX had been around for over a decade.
It's not that things like real-time multitasking and POSIX compatibility were unnecessary, but rather that these features had essentially no overhead compared to the mess of already-rotting DLLs and captive DOS environments that Windows was built on.
The people who were using Windows as an embedded system were already considered dangerously careless by the hard real time community... we were dubious about using UNIX, and UNIX was an order of magnitude cleaner and more reliable than Windows 3.11.
I would rather not have a heart monitor running on Windows, thank you very much. If the products based on Windows in 1993 go off the market, because the manufacturers can't find any more certificates of authenticity in their warehouses, we'll be all the better off for it.
Here's what I don't understand. If someone wants to actually pay for an old program, why not let them? If you want to reduce support offerings or even raise the price, why not sell the program anyway. It obviously fills a niche of people who prefer not to change their ways and products.
I can see why MS would emphasize the latest and greatest, but there are other ways besides cutting off permission to sell old stuff.
Am I more anon or more coward?
The relevant constitutional language is "for a limited time.". This appears to be "until we extend it again to perpetuate Disney's franchise on Steamboat Willey.". A federal law is all that's required to convert this to something more reasonable like "Three years, no extensions."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Okay, so let me get this straight. Windows XP is supposedly going to be cancelled ASAP, but Windows 10,000 BC Edition still being licensed until November?! I believe this makes approximately zero sense.
Why? Because for contemporary computers, Windows XP is, believe it or not, a decent operating system PROVIDED THAT you use nLite to customize your Windows XP installation CD-ROM to install the darn thing with all options changed to the opposite of the Microsoft-provided defaults, AND install CCleaner to run automatically on startup with all options selected, AND install Firefox and set it as the default browser, AND replace Notepad with your favorite text editor AND run it behind a Linux- or *BSD-based firewall... Provided you do all these things and probably a few more, all of which will take approximately an hour and a half to setup from first boot to completion if you use nLite, you'll get a pretty decent operating system. Windows 10,000 BC Edition won't really do much for you nowadays. Why is support for it lasting longer than for XP, which should supercede Vista?!
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
They're going to stop licensing their Vista performance upgrade?? :-(
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
I could very easily see them buying machines that are not technically licensed from Microsoft, on the grounds that Microsoft lawyers don't ride light rail, a little fudging of dates would conceal it from any realistic audit, and replacing every single kiosk with one that is powerful enough to run Vista would be insanely expensive both to buy and to run (electricity isn't free).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't understand if he/she is being sarcastic or not.
In other words, is this good, bad or neutral?
What would be the motivation to buy the new version? Generating revenue would be an issue if people would just say the old one was good enough, and not that it is freely available why should I bother buying the new one?
so twitter, this is what you're doing with all that free time you have left after the whole sockpuppet thing didn't work out?
Well IBM, of course, doesn't really embrace the four "freedoms". When it purchased Rational, it would no longer sell a license Visual Test and it didn't make it open source either.
Why? Because Visual Test was a low-cost alternative to other Rational testing applications.
Wake up and smell the Blue. The only IP that IBM has/will made/make open source, is the commodity stuff or stuff they can't make any money on.
What open source code reveals "discoveries" that could be considered a significant contribution to science or the arts?
I agree about Win9x stability being not so good, but XP Embedded might be worth a try. The NT line in general is much mor stable than Win9x, and XP Embedded can be cut down to use a lot less resources (by dropping all services you don't need).
Also, many embedded devices run some version of Linux these days. So that appears to be a reasonable alternative. Of course it will cost money to port the software, but there are advantages:
-Better support for modern hardware. The company I work for produces a device that runs on DOS, but it becomes increasingly obvious that support for hardware under DOS is being neglected by the hardware vendors. For instance, running modern graphics cards in VESA graphics mode is not guaranteed to work.
-More available memory. Again, between network drivers and the main software it has become difficult to squeeze everything on our DOS device into 640k. I've briefly looked into using a protected mode DOS extender, but it would require porting at least the 16 bit assembler routines. Probably it would conflict with some of our DOS drivers too...
-Multitasking support (if you want it, for us the absence of other tasks that steal the CPU at inconvenient times is an advantage).
C - the footgun of programming languages
I was about 5 when this was popular. From a 5 year old's point of view, it was the most stable version of Windows I ever knew. I distinctly remember toying with the brand new Windows 95, and wondering why it BSODed so many times...
try tinyXP
This made me smile, imagining telling my past self circa 1995 about that system you're running.
You see, back then there was DOS. Okay, there was also e.g. Amiga, but that ran so little of the programs that were actually popular at the time for common home use that it was incredibly niche and I have never even seen an Amiga system outside an emulator. And coming from DOS, even with Norton Commander, Windows was heaven. Multitasking, freely resizable windows, no more text mode word processing, support for the best video mode of my card regardless of the software used, I could go on and on. So what if closing a window required a doubleclick - back then almost all software required multiple key combinations to exit, at least in Windows it worked always the same, a doubleclick or Alt-F4. So what if minimized windows were obscured by other windows - before Windows I couldn't multitask at all. So what if the combination of the API and the 16-bits architecture was clunky - as a user I only noticed the UI, which worked very well and is essentially the same as what everyone uses today. So what if it relied on cooperative multitasking - back then the number of programs you ran was limited anyway and programs didn't hang as often. Windows was heaven and most of the faults I find with Windows today I simply didn't see at the time because I was happy with all the things Windows did that DOS didn't do at all.
Sure, WfW 3.11 is ancient, but unless Microsoft is losing money on the act of selling these licenses, there's no advantage in discontinuing the program for WfW 3.11 or for any version of Windows or DOS. Let's see... Media costs-$0, advertising-$0, support-$0, R&D-$0, bugfixes/code changes-$0. It's a pure cash cow product. If I were a manufacturer and wanted to license Windows 3.0 to use Real Mode, Windows/286 2.1, or even DOS 6.22/6.25/7.0 (yes, there was a DOS 6.25) for use in a closed, embedded system, why shouldn't Microsoft be willing to take my money???
This is just another example of Microsoft flexing its muscles pointlessly...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
as OpenGEM is still available and is being worked on to make it 32 bits. So your DOS machines can use OpenGEM instead of Windows 3.11 if you want to keep a GUI on them.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I have it on good authority that MS maintains a 16 bit windows that will run on ANYTHING and that they used this as the installer that did the initial configuration of NT (at least until NT 5.1 AKA XP).
Not sure about Vista's installer.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
From Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
While the current copyright legislation may adhere to the letter of this statement, it does not adhere to the intent. So sorry, but "lifetime of the author + 70 years" is not a fair time limitation, especially not in today's society. I hate to shout something that some would find absurd, such as "3 years, with a one-time 3 year extension (or no extension at all)", but it's the only way to fight the people on the opposing (and equally absurd) side shouting "125+ years is not enough!"
In my opinion, the entire work should be made public domain (including source code, etc.) once it's abandonware. The original "creator" abandoned it, so give it to the public. A later product is a derivative work? So be it. At least you got a huge head start on your competition, in terms of "deriving" works. Compete with your own products? Why not? If you can't make the next version be better than the previous version, then you have serious problems, and they don't necessarily relate to your product line. Maybe you should keep supporting the old version, instead of letting it fall by the wayside. (Don't get me wrong, Windows 3.11 was great, but is no longer all that relevant to Joe User, or even Joe Corporate User.)
The idea here, from the very beginning of our country, was to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not "secure financial gain in perpetuity for the producers of new products".
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
There is a port of the Basilisk II classic Mac emulator for Mac OS X. There is a universal binary although it doesn't work in '040 mode on Intel CPUs. The site recommends running the PPC version for this.
Intel Mac running PPC Mac code via Rosetta to run an emulation of a 68k Mac. The mind boggles.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
is it?
They finally got the last bug fixed. Now it's on to vista.
..employees or other stakeholders? I think it would probably negatively effect the US equity markets if suddenly the people voted that "peter could rob paul."
whoops grammar error.
What do you read, that Baen's fiction seems to fall so short of your standards?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.