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!"

Abandonware

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were really upset when Apple killed the "Classic" OS, just as many will feel the sting of XP support being abruptly withdrawn soon.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

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

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

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

Re:Abandonware

Are you saying that discontinued products should be made available for free or that they should be open-sourced?

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.

Re:Abandonware

I don't agree.

I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it. If you knowingly agree to be bound by a license, you should honor that agreement unless the licensor acts in an unconscionable way, and then your own actions should only be sufficient to address the specific issue. Everybody knows vendors stop supporting old software. You can't complain if the vendor gives you a couple years to upgrade and then pulls support, because you bought the license to use the software knowing this could happen.

This is important. This is why businesses and individuals should use open source software wherever possible: in order to control their future. Much of the open source software I use is because I don't like the license restrictions of the proprietary alternative.

People and organizations should support open source and free software rather than make deals with proprietary vendor then renege on them. And if people should be so cavalier with licenses, then the same applies to free licenses as well.

Re:Abandonware

So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?

Re:Abandonware

Why are you in the first place? Office has some nice built in templates just for that.

Re:Abandonware

So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?

I think IBM handles a lot of contracts in that market.

Re:Abandonware

You can actually download System 7.5.3 [apple.com] 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.

I don't believe it

A slashdot article without a typo? Can't half that!

But...

...will my "Bob" license still be valid?

Ahh the memories

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

hey, what's the problem with lantastic ? i earned my living out of it for a bunch of years. i liked the way the DOS boxes bleeped everytime the coax cable was open.

bleep! bleep! bleep! bleep!

and there i went with a 50 Ohm terminator to find the faulty node...

ahhh, the good old times.

now get of my lawn, punk.

Its meaningless really

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???

Now, now...

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*.

You just don't understand

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:You just don't understand

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 that's why your Windows 3.1 systems were stable. The stability of Windows 9x and earlier versions was susceptible to memory leaks due to their limited USER and GDI space. If your ace programmer had ported his app to Windows 95, it would have been at least as stable. The tick count problem was a stupid bug, true; but it was easy to fix and a patch was released for both 95 and 98. You could easily point to all the Y2K bugs in Windows 3.1 and call it "unstable" too, if you didn't patch it.

in 1993 & in 2008

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:Its not a joke, it can be serious

Also goes to show you that old isn't always 'bad'.

It's a good rule of thumb, though. I just found a cabbage in the fridge that I think we bought three months ago.

OMG, the stench!

Re:Its not a joke, it can be serious

And it goes to show that Stallman is inevitably right.

There's no reason why bits "rot". The only reason is because that software is closed source, and the ONE company ordained to maintain it refuses to do so. This isn't a problem in Free Software, where anybody can pay a programmer to maintain it to X date, regardless if the original creator is long dead (or imprisoned).

This isnt just aimed towards old unmaintained versions of Windows, but also aimed at every piece of code anybody uses that is not documented and opened. If it's closed source, the user is a serf.

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

Why dont they release the source code to the community?

Fear of embarrassment? :)

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

Probably because the majority of Vista's architecture is based on 3.11.

Re:Why not open source 3.1/3.11

>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.

Re:And elsewhere

With gas at $4.00+ per gallon, that horse-drawn carriage is looking more and more appealing.