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were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon.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

[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

[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

[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

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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

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.

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

[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: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: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: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

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.