Miscellaneous > Applications

Why not open source old stuff?

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latino4ever8:
Im not a programmer so i dont know the details... but i would guess that at the very least the competitors would know their tricks, if they have any... and the other would be that maybe its not that simple, maybe its more than just digging it up... -who knows... maybe its too much work...

M51DPS:
There's also the fact that if microsoft made any of their products open source now, they'd be showing support for the very movement they're trying to destory. But still, if only companies would make all of their stuff open source in the first place, they'd have all of it's benefits in the first place.

WMD:

quote:Originally posted by jtpenrod:

Suppose that Microsoft did that, by Open Sourcing Win 95... but its quality rockets past Win XP?
--- End quote ---


Well this really can't happen, unless they rewrite the entire kernel to be 32-bit.  And there goes compatibility.  After all, even without any bugs, the 16-bit DOS kernel would be rather lousy.

mobrien_12:
Don't forget, MS was pretty pissed off when that australian charity was installing unlicenced old copies of DOS and Windows 3.x on old compuers to be given to poor children.  

That wasn't even source... just binaries and they threatened this charity over software that they had declared dead and hadn't sold for years.  

I agree with the idea of open sourcing old code which is not of value to the company anymore.  Caldera used to do this (before Darth McBride came in).  They opensourced GEM and CPM...

Kintaro:
it would cost them money to release code, it would take them three minutes of hard corpate labour.

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