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

Abandonware

[clang_jangle]

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were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon.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.

Re:Abandonware

[Bogtha]

Are you saying that discontinued products should be made available for free or that they should be open-sourced?

I can't speak for clang_jangle, but I believe that software should be required to ship with buildable source if it is to qualify for copyright protection. It would be the software/copyright analogue of the disclosure required for patents. It would go some way to mitigating the problems caused by copyright as it is applied to software, abandonware being one of them.

Re:Abandonware

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The orphan works proposal that so many people love to hate would do just as you requested.

Ahh the memories

[dada21]

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.

Its meaningless really

[voss]

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???

You just don't understand

[frovingslosh]

While the tone of the /. post comes across as thinking this is funny, the actual truth is that this may well impact some oem vendors in a serious way. For all of it's faults, Win3.1 was far more stable than Win 95, 98, WIN me or any later version. I personally worked on mission critical systems that ran 24/7, never needing to be shutdown (Heck, usually the only time I would have to deal with our old Novell file servers was when the daylight savings time changes took effect, and if that had been taken care of at the application level rather than the system level they may have run for years without human contact). We had a number of DOS and even Win 3.1 systems that sat there cranking out the product day after day. The programmer who did the 3.1 application was a true craftsman, he took the time to track down every memory leak in his code and correct it, and those systems were quite capable for running indefinitely without ever going down.

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.

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

[fishbowl]

>Equally valid question: what real good would having the source available do for anyone?

And what about those of us who *do* have the source? (My university was one of the few with a source license.)
I wonder if end-of-lifing the product changes the contract terms.

Re:what a shame

[MBGMorden]

though I always hated exiting to DOS to play doom.

Actually, back when I was on a Windows 3.1 machine, I rarely even booted Windows itself. I took the "win" command out of autoexec.bat and just had it boot to a prompt. Most of what I did back then was run DOS programs and mess around on BBS's anyways (using a DOS based Terminal program), so I had little use for it. Even my word processing back then was done on an old copy of Wordperfect 5.1 that I copied (shhhhh) from my aunt's computer, so I even did my schoolwork in DOS.

Truth be told, for most DOS games that came out even after Windows 95 was introduced (of which there were a lot since DirectX came later and they wanted to keep games playable by 3.1 users), I still ended up exiting to DOS out of Win95 to play them.

Before I moved to Win95 though I did browse the net on Windows 3.1 for a short while. I was using Netscape + Eudora (and naturally Trumpet Winsock) to do my net stuff on that machine. My Win3.1 machine when I got rid of it was a 486DX 75Mhz with 6MB of RAM, an 80MB hard drive, SVGA graphics, CDROM, and sound card. Strange that it could still do the common web/email tasks I needed of it back then yet anything under a gigahertz with lass than 1GB of ram is considered unusable now :S.

Those in Portland, OR, understand very well.

[jd]

The local mass transit (Trimet) ticketing system runs entirely on Windows 3.11. Found that out when one of the maintenance engineers was rebooting one of the systems. Apparently, the machines are imported, Trimet doesn't have permission to do any software maintenance, there's no way in hell they're going to be able to afford to pay German engineers to come to the west coast to do a software update at all those locations, and there's an even smaller chance Trimet is going to be happy running multiple versions of the software, as it means getting engineers with greater skills (which will cost) and they'll have to keep a wider range of spare parts (which will also cost).

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).