17 years that Win95 substituted Win3.1: publish full sources

[Fabrizio J Bonsignore]

Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.

Danilo J Bonsignore

[China Blue [Tor], Meersburg]

Post by Fabrizio J Bonsignore
Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned

17 years refers to patents. The entire innovation is revealed in the patent
application so that on expiration it is already public knowledge.

Copyrights can last for decades (or forever if you have Disney's lawyers) and do
not require any disclosure of the work.

Trade secrets can be maintained indefinitely, solely at the discretion of the
owner. They have no protection if another party comes up the same technology.

Some propeitary software is made public at the owner's discretion, such as if
they are no longer making a profit and/or they want to transfer maintenance to
customers.

Microsoft has been required to publish accurate interfaces in anti-trust
settlements, but otherwise they can do whatever they want with their own. Of
course anyone who buys from Microsoft has created their own punishment.

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

In <chine.bleu-***@news.eternal-september.org>, on
07/26/2012

Post by China Blue [Tor], Meersburg
Copyrights can last for decades (or forever if you have Disney's
lawyers) and do not require any disclosure of the work.

Only because Congress has interpreted the word "limited" as meaning
"indefinite" and the courts have let them get away with it. Anybody
with claims to be a strict constructionist should be hollering bloody
murder.

[Fabrizio J Bonsignore]

On Jul 26, 4:08 pm, "China Blue [Tor], Meersburg"

Post by China Blue [Tor], Meersburg
Copyrights can last for decades (or forever if you have Disney's lawyers) and do
not require any disclosure of the work.

Oh, Disney lawyers are all homeless and look and act like cartoons? :|

Danilo J Bonsignore

[China Blue [Tor], Meersburg]

Post by Fabrizio J Bonsignore
On Jul 26, 4:08 pm, "China Blue [Tor], Meersburg"

Post by China Blue [Tor], Meersburg
Copyrights can last for decades (or forever if you have Disney's lawyers) and do
not require any disclosure of the work.

Oh, Disney lawyers are all homeless and look and act like cartoons? :|

A Disney lawyer: Loading Image...

[KBH]

You might be interested in DOS:

http://www.drdos.net/

But the drdos.com website now offers a $20 license and download of a
bootable DOS instead of just the license. So the ftp's of drdos.net
are not needed.


I would recommend running Turbo Pascal 7 on it. But I can no longer
find the French edu website that allowed TP7 downloads to the US
Virgin Islands.

[KBH]

Post by KBH
http://www.drdos.net/
But the drdos.com website now offers a $20 license and download of a
bootable DOS instead of just the license. So the ftp's of drdos.net
are not needed.
I would recommend running Turbo Pascal 7 on it. But I can no longer
find the French edu website that allowed TP7 downloads to the US
Virgin Islands.

Oh, PowerBasic still sells a programming language that runs on DOS.

[Wally W.]

Post by Fabrizio J Bonsignore
Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995. Now
it is 17 years. Seventeen years is a typical period of protection for
products which may extended some ways, but now that Win 3.1 turned
into a plethora of more superadvanced OSs, for historical, cultural,
technical reasons Microsoft ought to follow the popular open source
model and publish full, complete, compilable source, data files,
driver files, etc for the popular old OS and its utilities, along with
the necessary compilers, linkers and other tools to make it work. This
would not only preserve the venerable OS but would also trigger a boom
in development and business for the company itself, besides being a
service to the general public.
Danilo J Bonsignore

That is not at the top of my list of things Microsoft ought to do.

[Keith Thompson]

Post by Fabrizio J Bonsignore
Windows 3.1 was **officially** superseded by Windows 95 in 1995.

[snip]

Just a reminder: this is not topical in any of the newsgroups to which
it was cross-posted.

(If you want to follow up to this, you'll need to manually adjust the
newsgroups header.)

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Post by Keith Thompson
(If you want to follow up to this, you'll need to manually adjust
the newsgroups header.)

What give you that idea?