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were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon.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

[gEvil (beta)]

Are you saying that discontinued products should be made available for free or that they should be open-sourced? If it's the former, that's one thing (though that still doesn't necessarily free the original manufacturer from any license or patent obligations they may have made). If it's the latter (which is what your last sentence makes it sound like), that would be a major issue, since the underlying technologies (which themselves are usually patented or licensed) are often used in the newer products that replaced the older ones.

Re:Abandonware

[Hatta]

Of course they should be open sourced. Ideally all four of the software freedoms should be enshrined in law.

Re:Abandonware

[CastrTroy]

You can actually download System 7.5.3 from Apple for free. Sure you don't get the source code to edit it, but at least you can still run it. I think this is a good solution. Once your software is no longer commercially viable, let people use it for free.

Re:Abandonware

[el_chupanegre]

I think basically because new software is very rarely a revolution and very often an evolution. If XP became public domain for example, a large portion of Vista goes public with it by relation. It only takes a few geeks to fill in the blanks and release the patches and everyone could have a 'roll your own' Windows that would probably be better than Microsoft has to offer.

Also, there is the obvious case where thousands of geeks grep the code looking for amusing sections and potential embarrassment for the company releasing it. Didn't that happen when the Win2K code was leaked?

Finally, they would say they have invested thousands and thousands of man-hours into the code, it's theirs and nobody elses! Of course, most of us here are F/OSS developers and that idea is a bit alien to us, but that's the way they do it unfortunately.

Re:Abandonware

[jedidiah]

Discontinued products should be made available consistent with the spirit of the
original intent of US Copyright and the actual relevant Constitutional language.

Anything that patented is already "protected" in terms of "personal private property".
Further obfuscation simply isn't necessary. Furthermore, it's entirely moot since
anything patented has to be disclosed anyways (there are no secrets involved).

There may be complications in using the source but that's a situation that exists
already with Free Software.

If it's not worth the author keeping for sale anymore then it should quickly enter
the public domain. Abandonware should quickly go PD across the board.

It's really the only way to make quasi-perpetual copyright not stiffle new creators.

Re:Abandonware

[Verdatum]

Companies believe, and often jusifiably so, that it makes little business sense to do this. Even though they abandon it now, they reserve the right to "unabandon" it later (granted this makes more sense for properties like out-of-print books than for out of date software titles). Maintaining the rights allow companies to do things like charge you ten dollars to play the original Super Mario Brothers on your Wii. Second, since the old software can do some of the same things as the new software, consumers could for certain applications, go with the public domain OS when otherwise they would be forced to pay for the current OS. Microsoft does not want to be in competition with it's own now-profitless product, that would just be silly.

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

[operagost]

That would make software "free", but the people who create it less so. Shouldn't I be allowed to choose how I distribute my software? Let the market decide.

Re:Abandonware

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?

Re:Abandonware

[Adriax]

Why are you in the first place? Office has some nice built in templates just for that.

Re:Abandonware

[larry bagina]

That linus torvaldes guy isn't selling linux, so I guess that should be public domain as well?

Re:Abandonware

[colmore]

So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?

I think IBM handles a lot of contracts in that market.

Re:Abandonware

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I think old versions should all be made available, just as soon as they are no longer available for purchase. Then perhaps we would see some actual innovation. About a year ago I stumbled across WFW 3.11, and DOS 6.22. On a slow day at work I installed them on a recent system. I must say DOS and Win3.11 fly on modern hardware. :)

Re:Abandonware

[hey!]

I don't agree.

I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it. If you knowingly agree to be bound by a license, you should honor that agreement unless the licensor acts in an unconscionable way, and then your own actions should only be sufficient to address the specific issue. Everybody knows vendors stop supporting old software. You can't complain if the vendor gives you a couple years to upgrade and then pulls support, because you bought the license to use the software knowing this could happen.

This is important. This is why businesses and individuals should use open source software wherever possible: in order to control their future. Much of the open source software I use is because I don't like the license restrictions of the proprietary alternative.

People and organizations should support open source and free software rather than make deals with proprietary vendor then renege on them. And if people should be so cavalier with licenses, then the same applies to free licenses as well.

Re:Abandonware

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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

Re:Abandonware

[IntlHarvester]

The logic behind the decision was that MacOS updates were free in the early years (until 7.1) and many users thought there was a implied promise there. So, 7.5.3 was more of a sop to owners of 68K Macs to allow them to get up to speed with modern networking and so on. Everyone who bought a PowerMac was already in the era when the OS revisions cost money.

MacOS 9 was bundled with OS X until 10.3, IIRC.

Re:Abandonware

[blackest_k]

well I guess that means that windows 3.11 has 5 years before all the patents expire if the gif patent is anything to go by.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format

That still seems like too long but thats the deal with patents.

I thought the exclusivity granted by a patent had an expiry date and one that should be enforced.

Re:Abandonware

[OrangeTide]

The problem is there is no reasonable definition of Abandonware. Look at an old 1980s arcade game. It's 25+ years since someone made the unit. But there is likely 1. a thriving used market. 2. the current copyright holder for the ROM might want to make some money off selling it as part of an emulation package. This happens all the time, especially now that "retro" sells. All the current game console seems to have a "collection" or "anthology" with a bunch of old games on it. Those have to be licensed and someone is making money off selling those old Midway, Sega, Namco, Taito, etc games.

One issue worth bringing up is that computer software generally doesn't have much aftermarket support. Especially for things like Windows which have a license that is usually non-transferable. Selling your used XP discs seems to be (almost) as illegal as making a copy to install on another computer. Seems strange to me. (I think if you want to call it "stealing" you should at least require that all of it be fully transferable and have no restrictions over physical property).

Of course it is always possible for congress to make a law that would shorten copyrights for software, and thus make abandonware possible. Amend the law so that it automatically expires after 10 year of your last publish date would be reasonable way to do abandonware. But still have it expire if it exceed some time from the date of creation like it currently does (what is it now, like 10,000 years? :)

Re:Abandonware

[Endo13]

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.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree somewhat with this idea - though perhaps more with the specifics added to it by others, than your original idea quoted here.

First, how do we define "abandoned" in this case. The best hard line I can think of off-hand is "when official support is discontinued". But if that is where the line would be drawn, it puts software developers/publishers in a very difficult position. Their own older software because their biggest enemy and competition, like WinXP vs. Vista, except to a much greater extent. For an example, let's bring Win2K into the mix. If Win2K was now legally free to obtain and use because of support being discontinued, how many customers would have purchased XP? And more, how many would have purchased Vista? For the most part Win2K can do all the essential functions that either of the newer versions can do, and with a lot less bloat and overhead to boot. Many users still prefer Win2K, even at an equal price point. So with such an "abandonware is free" rule, now the software company has to tread a very careful path, so as to make their next version just enough better to entice users to switch from the old version, but yet not so good as to make a better version unfeasible. Service packs and major patches would become history; such updates would have to become a new pay-for version of the product. Otherwise, the only option is to keep supporting old versions of software merely so it doesn't become "abandonware" (and therefore free). Even worse would be if the hard line for becoming abandonware is whether or not the product is still sold by the publisher. Then they would not only be locked into perpetually providing support, but also keeping the old product available for sale to compete with the newer versions.

I think the real issues here that need to be addressed are software patents and ridiculous copyright durations. If those get properly fixed, abandonware would become free by default at an appropriate time.

Re:Abandonware

[pla]

I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it.

The entire concept of intellectual property (by which I include both patents and copyrights) exists precisely because "users want it" - ie, We-The-People grant the creator a limited monopoly to encourage that entity to do their thing.

Without the "limited" part of that, they, not the users, have broken their end of the bargain.



By explicitly no longer allowing us to license WFW311 (or releasing it into the wild for free), Microsoft has done no less than exploited our beneficence - They've gotten their cash, now they want to take our shared cultural resource away from the very society that allowed them to gain by it.

Unacceptible.

Re:Abandonware

[hey!]

I would argue that any license that restricts the 4 fundamental software freedoms is unconscionable.

But your argument would be a pretty weak one, unless you were forced to accept the license. There is very little software you can't live without, and these days there are free alternative to almost everything. You might prefer Windows to Linux, but that's no excuse to obtain Windows under false pretenses.

I'd bet even RMS, who thinks proprietary licensing is evil, isn't going to run an unlicensed copy of Windows in QEMU just so he can test software on it. This is the kind of thing programmers rationalize doing all the time; they're doing Microsoft a favor. Maybe Microsoft secretly agree with them. But the more strongly you believe in the principle, the more up front you should be, even if it becomes confrontational. It's not civil disobedience if you do it in secret.

Some contracts are unconscionable because the nature of the terms were misrepresented to a party that could not be expected to understand them. There was a recent case in the news of a financial advisor who convinced a 90 year old to take money out of the annuity on which she was living and put it into an annuity that matured in sixty years. That's unconscionable. If you license proprietary software, you know darned well you aren't allowed to install it on more than one machine, so you shouldn't agree to that if you think it's wrong.

Some contracts are unconscionable because they are so bad for society they are repugnant. You can't sell your organs, or agree to become an indentured servant. Perhaps you think proprietary software licenses fall into this category. Then don't agree. It's at least as unconscionable for you to offer your kidney for sale to somebody on dialysis with no intention of following through than it is for that person to offer money for it.

It's unconscionable for you to agree to an unconscionable agreement with no intention of following through. It is not only dishonest, it encourages the very things you are supposedly against. If it weren't for "piracy" in the 80s and early 90s, Microsoft would never have become as powerful as it did.

Re:Abandonware

[stinerman]

I would like all software to be FOSS, but I don't think it should be law.

I do think that source must be published and on file in the Library of Congress in order to receive copyright protection, though. Source must be published so that we can properly study and be enriched by the work. Software is an odd case that the founders could have never foreseen. Really what use is there of the Windows 1.0 binaries when the source is gone? It'd be like trying to read a book without the words, yet the book still being useful. Published source is fundamental to the progress of science and useful arts.

I don't accept is copyright protection on top of patent protection on top of trade secret protection with an EULA thrown in to cover all the bases.

If any proprietary vendor thinks publishing the source is a bad deal, they can always use contract law to keep their customers from copying purchased software. And I would have no problem with that so long as it was a real contract, not a click-thru "contract".

In the end, copyright is supposed to benefit society, not authors of creative works.

Re:Abandonware

[smittyoneeach]

Hey, now: so many arguments these days are predicated upon assertions that your free will is somehow constrained.
Fortune forbid that anyone take responsibility and think clearly these days. How would we ever hold elections?

Re:Abandonware

[madsenj37]

Making it free would cost Microsoft money. They would have to host it somewhere and pay the costs of someone accessing it for free. As mush as I dislike Microsoft, that is not fair. Those who wanted it, paid for it. Microsoft has supported this product longer than most other companies with their respective software.

Re:Abandonware

[Super Jamie]

Agreed. See the amusing, enlightening, and very readable Unix-Haters Handbook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook

Re:Abandonware

[Bonobo_Unknown]

I think you meant to say: "Do you need a hand?"

Re:Abandonware

[meringuoid]

So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?

I think IBM handles a lot of contracts in that market.

Well, they have done in the past.

Re:Abandonware

[rbanffy]

BTW, is A/UX considered abandonware? I would love to load it on one of my ancient Macs.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

This news doesn't bode well for Windows 95...

I don't believe it

[snoyberg]

A slashdot article without a typo? Can't half that!

But...

[Illbay]

...will my "Bob" license still be valid?

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.

Re:Ahh the memories

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

hey, what's the problem with lantastic ? i earned my living out of it for a bunch of years. i liked the way the DOS boxes bleeped everytime the coax cable was open.

bleep! bleep! bleep! bleep!

and there i went with a 50 Ohm terminator to find the faulty node...

ahhh, the good old times.

now get of my lawn, punk.

Re:Ahh the memories

[dada21]

nobody used networks to make a multinode bbs you god damned liar

Since you're an AC, it's not worth responding to YOU, but maybe as a lesson to those who don't recall the wonderful BBS days, here's a recap:

I ran two multinode BBSes concurrently as I tested various applications. Up until the age of 17, I made fairly decent money with my multinode BBS (primary) which ran a hacked version of Telegard called Renegade. Renegade ran multinodes either under DESQview or via a wired network. At the same time, I purchased the ultra-expensive but amazing multi-threaded BBS application called MajorBBS, which ran as a compiled solution (doors and other add-ons were either compiled into the runtime EXE, or eventually were DLLs that were called by the runtime EXE). MajorBBS did NOT need a network or DESQview for multinodes, but supported them internally in its wicked-fast C coding.

The problem with MajorBBS was the need for expensive multicomm cards. I believe I paid well over $2000 at the time for a 16-port serial adapter. This let me attach all the modems I needed. The other downside for MajorBBS is that doors (online games) were coded only by professional companies, and they cost a ton of cash. Renegade was DOS based and used a DOS exec command to run external doors, so amateur coders could, and did, write decent games. Some were even multinode using text files to pass data between the various PCs or DESQview "nodes." This was slower, but worked fine. I remember the latency in the chatroom at Renegade to being over 1 second, until we discovered that you could run a RAM drive and put the temp files there. This sped it up signficantly.

LANtastic was the de facto standard for multinode BBS operations that used more than one PC. I prefered this route because the processors at the time were used less in a heavy-intensity BBS. I had a ton of downloads, a ton of message boards (FIDOnet), and a ton of chatroom activity, so running DESQview was out of the question. The other problem was the fact that we had this war between Expanded memory and Extended memory (RAM over 640k accesible). The 286s I used didn't access RAM over 640k well, so they were cheap but limited for DESQview. The much-more expensive 386 processors would use up to 4MB (or 8MB or even 16MB) but RAM was expensive, and I received many donated 286's for the good cause. At one point I had 12 286s in my bedroom to handle the traffic and phone lines.

MajorBBS was much preferred by my users, since the multi-threading internally gave ZERO latency to multinode communications (in games and in the chat area). This meant that multinode games were very realtime in terms of battles between players or players and monsters, versus Renegade where you might attack another player, and the 1 second delay would mean the player though he got away freely, but you thought you hit him. Lots of ugliness there.

MajorBBS also had X.25 connectivity, which let me access national users without them paying a hefty phone bill.

So, yes, people did use networks for multinode BBSes. Troll.

Re:Ahh the memories

[ogre2112]

Good post. I had a similar experience with Lantastic, a BBS, and then moving on to WfW and what I called naively at the time, "Internet Multitasking" using the Trumpet WinSock. "Oh boy I can FTP and use Mosaic at the *same* time!"

Re:Its not a joke, it can be serious

[Illbay]

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!

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???

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

[Spy der Mann]

Why dont they release the source code to the community?

Fear of embarrassment? :)

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

[mmxsaro]

Probably because the majority of Vista's architecture is based on 3.11.

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:You just don't understand

[operagost]

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 that's why your Windows 3.1 systems were stable. The stability of Windows 9x and earlier versions was susceptible to memory leaks due to their limited USER and GDI space. If your ace programmer had ported his app to Windows 95, it would have been at least as stable. The tick count problem was a stupid bug, true; but it was easy to fix and a patch was released for both 95 and 98. You could easily point to all the Y2K bugs in Windows 3.1 and call it "unstable" too, if you didn't patch it.

Re:You just don't understand

[bazorg]

For all of it's faults, Win3.1 was far more stable than Win 95, 98, WIN me or any later version

they must have (had) a different kind of Windows 3.1 in your country.

Re:And elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

With gas at $4.00+ per gallon, that horse-drawn carriage is looking more and more appealing.

in 1993 & in 2008

[hxnwix]

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...

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.

Now, now...

[BForrester]

I suspect win 3.11 is licensed for POS devices...

Just because someone is using crappy hardware, it doesn't give you the right to use language like *that*.

Re:Its not a joke, it can be serious

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Re:Does anyone know who's using it in embedded?

[jabuzz]

Rubbish there was a free TCP/IP stack for WfWg 3.11 as a download from Microsoft. I still have a copy on disk.

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).

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

[MarkGriz]

Probably because the majority of Vista's architecture is based on 3.11.

Only the parts that work

Re:Confused

[HikingStick]

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...

At least we still will have GEM

[Orion Blastar]

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.

Re:Wake up and smell the Blue

[IntlHarvester]

IBM is a great test to determine if someone knows anything about IT beyond what they read on Slashdot.