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Okay, I went back and dug through the old Windows 3.0 source code to answer this question. It took me about four hours to study it all, try to understand what
by rhplus 14y ago
Okay, I went back and dug through the old Windows 3.0 source code to answer this question. It took me about four hours to study it all, try to understand what the code was doing, and then distill the conclusions into this article. Writing up the results took another two hours. That's six hours I could've spent doing something enjoyable.
It's interesting that Raymond has the source at hand. How many people at Microsoft have general access to the Windows 3.0 source code still? I wonder what barriers remain for Microsoft to just release early Windows source to the academic community so that Raymond doesn't have to be the proxy for all these questions? Is there any evidence than any valuable Windows 3.0 code remains in Windows 7 and is therefore worth protecting?
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoMany possible reasons: - still part of current Windows (unsure about specific code, but 32-bit Win7 still has enough code to run Win3x apps, possible Win8 does but haven't confirmed personally) - third-party code they don't have full rights to - trade secrets - pride - simply don't care
- RyJones 14y agoYour second reason is right on.
- steve-howard 14y agoWhat I took away from that statement was how incredibly sharp you have to be to summarize the differences between ancient kernels (and he implies that he hasn't seen the source code in a long time) in about 4 hours.
- mappu 14y agoLarge parts of the source code to NT4 and 2000 were leaked and are trivially available - and there's also the WRK for more modern kernel sources. Of course, simply having read illegally-downloaded, copyrighted microsoft code makes you a liability in the eyes of several open source projects such as Wine and ReactOS. That doesn't stop some people making interesting windows distros, though - my favourite example is this attempt at recreating NT history: http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=10880 http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=10...
- yuhong 14y agoAnd the old MS-DOS 6.0 source too.