MIT License
Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source
Submitted 6 months ago by Dnew10@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/4/microsoft-and-ibm-make-ms-dos-4-00-open-source/
Comments
LimpRimble@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Assembly 85.0%C 13.1%TangledHyphae@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was shocked as I went through the source struggling to find any modules that had C. Craziness.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Will it help improve wine? If yes, great! If no, I geuss it’s a great learning tool of new OS devs.
Yaztromo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).
This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.
As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Extremely enlightening comment here.
Sounds like IBM kindof got ripped off. Seems about right for Gates/Ballmer/Microsoft.
And I bet a lot more of that jank is still in modern Windows than I’d like to think about.
Toes@ani.social 6 months ago
I’d like to see the same for 5. Could potentially help with maintaining legacy stuff.
Toes@ani.social 6 months ago
It could be helpful for dosbox devs.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The only reason they would ever open source something like this is because there’s no practical use for it in modern-day computing.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah. This is Microsoft we’re talking about.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 6 months ago
DosBox gonna get a boost?
hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
MIT license too, huh. I was sort of expecting a more restrictive one because, well, Microsoft and IBM
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
They could not care less, this is so ancient and irrelevant.
hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Something being ancient and irrelevant tdoesn’t stop a lot of companies.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Then once all the problems are fixed, make it private again.
cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Even Windows XP is unofficially open source at this point.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
Great.
This should be the standard for old retired software.
Crackhappy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No. This is not great. This is older than all of my kids. Fuck… this is older than my partner. This is not a good thing, this is far beyond the point where it should be open source. Where the fuck is DOS 6.22? Eh? Or Windows 3.11? This is stupid and dumb. Not to be celebrated.
spongebue@lemmy.world 6 months ago
So should it not have been done at all because it wasn’t enough for you?
nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 6 months ago
The historical value alone it already a reason for it to become open source.
Siegfried@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I see the crack, but where is the happy?