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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were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon.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
This news doesn't bode well for Windows 95...
A slashdot article without a typo? Can't half that!
Thank God for evolution.
...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.
Also goes to show you that old isn't always 'bad'.
It's a good rule of thumb, though. I just found a cabbage in the fridge that I think we bought three months ago.
OMG, the stench!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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???
Why dont they release the source code to the community?
Fear of embarrassment? :)
Probably because the majority of Vista's architecture is based on 3.11.
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.
With gas at $4.00+ per gallon, that horse-drawn carriage is looking more and more appealing.
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...
>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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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*.
Except that's not the Microsoft situation.
They are much more like GM in this respect: able to be largely
oblivious to non-trivial user requirements and completely able
to ignore anything as saavy as planning for the future or
anticipating new trends.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
And it goes to show that Stallman is inevitably right.
There's no reason why bits "rot". The only reason is because that software is closed source, and the ONE company ordained to maintain it refuses to do so. This isn't a problem in Free Software, where anybody can pay a programmer to maintain it to X date, regardless if the original creator is long dead (or imprisoned).
This isnt just aimed towards old unmaintained versions of Windows, but also aimed at every piece of code anybody uses that is not documented and opened. If it's closed source, the user is a serf.
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.
I bet most of us can remember the day you loaded 3.11.... and said "you gotta be kidding me"!
I was a Mac user, so I was more like "Thank god I don't have to run WordPerfect anymore!"
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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)
Probably because the majority of Vista's architecture is based on 3.11.
Only the parts that work
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
This is news because it says something about WfW 3.11--it worked. In the manufacturing plant where I currently work, we have a couple of industrial robots that run on 3.11. By MS finally pulling the plug, some equipment manufacturers will be in a tizzy to modernize their software (and firmware). Before this news, it wasn't broken, so why fix it.
The reference to XP is in the light of MS sunsetting the availability of that OS for most OEMs (save for those of the ultra-mobile class)--they're getting rid of something that worked and was accepted by the customer base. It may be a sound move in business theory (and, I'd argue, for WfW 3.11, something long overdue), but it is not likely to make some consumer channels happy.
Of course, you could argue that the writing has been on the wall for a long time, so let's hope that most of the WfW 3.11 users have been planning for this one...
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
like the .wft code that was still in vista when that big hack hit.
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.
Is it?
One goes to the store and buys software. First Sale doctrine, right? Nope, you have to agree to arbitrary terms listed on the disc after you open it. After all, if you opened it, you must have copied it.
Many times, these softwares have protections to make installing your software harder, if not impossible (in cases of Starforce and other protections). After this, the only real way to gain resolution for getting your money back is to sue. And you probably wont get your money (hard to extract money out of a company in another state).
Say, things go alright afterward. I had this very problem with a client who used Quickbooks and had their database "fail". When you call tech support, they want 100$ or some ransom money to fix their product. In actuality, they have "secret codes" to activate simple things like database verification and data integrity. You download nothing. Instead, you pay yet more money to fix an intentionally broken and incomplete product. No amount of money is ever enough.
And near the end of life, we do know that software gets "old" because these companies make new software and abandon the old. But really, do the bits expire and rot to the point of no return? Nope. The companies want a continual revenue stream which they can rebuild the basic interface and re-sell as a completely new product.
And, after the product is removed from the "market", these companies still hold an iron grip on their copyrights. Why, for example does MS not allow donated copies of Windows 95? There were a few groups who were setting poorer people with computers using Win95 until MS said it was against their EULA.
Once you buy in to this type of software, one stays on their land with their permission until eliminated(whoops there goes your license key). You as the serf cannot sell your piece, nor can you do much else not specifically ordained by the Manor.
Sounds like Serfdom to me, minus the part of we people having a choice to never go there to begin with. That choice is Free Software. Stallman is right.
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.
.torrent plz ;-)
The thing about OSS is that it's POSSIBLE to maintain "abandoned" software. That doesn't guarantee that such software WILL be maintained, but it's still better than proprietary software, which guarantees that abandonware WON'T be maintained by anyone.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.