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!"

Comments

Re:Abandonware

[novakyu]

Let the market decide.

How do you propose to let the market decide when the government has granted you a perpetual monopoly (often euphemistically called "copyright")?

Say what you want, but "let the market decide" is the last thing you can possibly say when proprietary software is involved.

This doesn't make sense...

[BUL2294]

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...