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Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open t

Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued. This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary code. You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.

smitelli 2y ago
> If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. The Windows NT 4 source code exists in multiple public repos on GitHub, and the one from the first Google result has been there for at least four years.
- userbinator 2y ago
  ...and the ones for later versions are easily found on GitHub too --- GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft. On the one hand, great, but on the other, that's how much (little) they care about Windows as a source of revenue.
  - account42 2y ago
    Ancient Windows NT code being available hardly threatens Microsoft's revenue from Windows sales.
pjc50 2y ago
As the video games people know, piracy is preservation and preservation nearly always requires "piracy". It's very clear from the way the Internet Archive works that pre-emptively taking a copy without permission is the only way to guarantee that copies actually exist. > You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. Yeah, legal preservation efforts will probably never get that. The torrent is still out there if you just want to look at it, though.
account42 2y ago
> You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. What's isane is that you are not legally allowed to release code that hasn't had any commercial value whatsoever for ages or where it takes a full legal team to even find out who might "own" the rights. Copyright is positively bonkers.

smitelli 2y ago

> If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. The Windows NT 4 source code exists in multiple public repos on GitHub, and the one from the first Google result has been there for at least four years.

userbinator 2y ago
...and the ones for later versions are easily found on GitHub too --- GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft. On the one hand, great, but on the other, that's how much (little) they care about Windows as a source of revenue.
- account42 2y ago
  Ancient Windows NT code being available hardly threatens Microsoft's revenue from Windows sales.

pjc50 2y ago

As the video games people know, piracy is preservation and preservation nearly always requires "piracy". It's very clear from the way the Internet Archive works that pre-emptively taking a copy without permission is the only way to guarantee that copies actually exist. > You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. Yeah, legal preservation efforts will probably never get that. The torrent is still out there if you just want to look at it, though.

account42 2y ago

> You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. What's isane is that you are not legally allowed to release code that hasn't had any commercial value whatsoever for ages or where it takes a full legal team to even find out who might "own" the rights. Copyright is positively bonkers.