MS To Finally End OEM Licensing For Windows 3.11 388
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!"
Abandonware (Score:5, Interesting)
AHMAGAD! (Score:1, Interesting)
Ahh the memories (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Abandonware (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Its meaningless really (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Abandonware (Score:3, Interesting)
I would applaud that, and not just for software. Any out of print book, album, movie; anything that can be given copyright protection should enter the public domain if it is out of print.
Too bad we have the best legislators that money can buy.
Re:Abandonware (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You just don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Why not open source 3.1/3.11 (Score:5, Interesting)
>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.
Embedded Windows 3.11 was crazy in 1993. (Score:3, Interesting)
Around the time that people were developing new software for Windows 3.11 they had the option of using smaller, faster, and less power-hungry operating systems like OS/9 (which had recently been re-released as OS/9000 but is now OS/9 again) and QNX had been around for over a decade.
It's not that things like real-time multitasking and POSIX compatibility were unnecessary, but rather that these features had essentially no overhead compared to the mess of already-rotting DLLs and captive DOS environments that Windows was built on.
The people who were using Windows as an embedded system were already considered dangerously careless by the hard real time community... we were dubious about using UNIX, and UNIX was an order of magnitude cleaner and more reliable than Windows 3.11.
I would rather not have a heart monitor running on Windows, thank you very much. If the products based on Windows in 1993 go off the market, because the manufacturers can't find any more certificates of authenticity in their warehouses, we'll be all the better off for it.
Re:Abandonware (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ahh the memories (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Abandonware (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I could argue that licenses like the GPL allow for more rights than are granted under copyright law.
I'd use this fact by saying that longer terms on licenses that grant MORE rights to everybody would be justified in "promoting the sciences and arts". After all, all derivative works (which are expressly allowed, unlike copyright) must be under the same terms, thus promoting arts and sciences.
More restrictive licenses associated to copyrights should have less time because they benefit fewer people.
It'd be interesting to run a study to see if that is true.
Re:Abandonware (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what a shame (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This makes no sense! (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay, so let me get this straight. Windows XP is supposedly going to be cancelled ASAP, but Windows 10,000 BC Edition still being licensed until November?! I believe this makes approximately zero sense.
Why? Because for contemporary computers, Windows XP is, believe it or not, a decent operating system PROVIDED THAT you use nLite [nliteos.com] to customize your Windows XP installation CD-ROM to install the darn thing with all options changed to the opposite of the Microsoft-provided defaults, AND install CCleaner [ccleaner.com] to run automatically on startup with all options selected, AND install Firefox and set it as the default browser, AND replace Notepad with your favorite text editor AND run it behind a Linux- or *BSD-based firewall... Provided you do all these things and probably a few more, all of which will take approximately an hour and a half to setup from first boot to completion if you use nLite, you'll get a pretty decent operating system. Windows 10,000 BC Edition won't really do much for you nowadays. Why is support for it lasting longer than for XP, which should supercede Vista?!
Re:You just don't understand (Score:3, Interesting)
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?"
The most insidious part of the 40 (and some) days - 65536 minutes is 45 and a half days - crash was that everything appeared normal. The mouse would move the cursor and the icons were still all visible on the desktop. The problem was that no amount of double-clicking or keyboard shortcuts would make anything actually happen.
(I found this one out the hard way - leaving the machine on to let the daily backup complete, while I went home)
Those in Portland, OR, understand very well. (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Wake up and smell the Blue (Score:3, Interesting)
Well IBM, of course, doesn't really embrace the four "freedoms". When it purchased Rational, it would no longer sell a license Visual Test and it didn't make it open source either.
Why? Because Visual Test was a low-cost alternative to other Rational testing applications.
Wake up and smell the Blue. The only IP that IBM has/will made/make open source, is the commodity stuff or stuff they can't make any money on.
Re:Its not a joke, it can be serious (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it?
One goes to the store and buys software. First Sale doctrine, right? Nope, you have to agree to arbitrary terms listed on the disc after you open it. After all, if you opened it, you must have copied it.
Many times, these softwares have protections to make installing your software harder, if not impossible (in cases of Starforce and other protections). After this, the only real way to gain resolution for getting your money back is to sue. And you probably wont get your money (hard to extract money out of a company in another state).
Say, things go alright afterward. I had this very problem with a client who used Quickbooks and had their database "fail". When you call tech support, they want 100$ or some ransom money to fix their product. In actuality, they have "secret codes" to activate simple things like database verification and data integrity. You download nothing. Instead, you pay yet more money to fix an intentionally broken and incomplete product. No amount of money is ever enough.
And near the end of life, we do know that software gets "old" because these companies make new software and abandon the old. But really, do the bits expire and rot to the point of no return? Nope. The companies want a continual revenue stream which they can rebuild the basic interface and re-sell as a completely new product.
And, after the product is removed from the "market", these companies still hold an iron grip on their copyrights. Why, for example does MS not allow donated copies of Windows 95? There were a few groups who were setting poorer people with computers using Win95 until MS said it was against their EULA.
Once you buy in to this type of software, one stays on their land with their permission until eliminated(whoops there goes your license key). You as the serf cannot sell your piece, nor can you do much else not specifically ordained by the Manor.
Sounds like Serfdom to me, minus the part of we people having a choice to never go there to begin with. That choice is Free Software. Stallman is right.
Re:Ahh the memories (Score:2, Interesting)
We attended local BBS picnics and get-togethers, and being a sysop was a little like being a rock star. (Yeah, I actually got some back then!) When you connected to a BBS, you connected to people, and you had a pretty good chance of actually getting to meet them in person.
Oh, and it wasn't called registration back then...
It was validation!
Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Abandonware (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember A/UX on a big IIfx with a 21" Radius behemoth on top. The IIfx case was dangerously close to structural failure.
But that was _the_ Unix workstation to have.
Re:Abandonware (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, is A/UX considered abandonware? I would love to load it on one of my ancient Macs.