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MS DOS code made public

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 11:38 am
by Jezze
Could be interesting to you guys perhaps? I havent looked into it further.

http://www.computerhistory.org/press/ms ... -code.html

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:23 pm
by shikhin
Hi,

It has a funny license which says "You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works." and "You may publish and present papers or articles on the results of your research, and while distribution of all or substantial portions of the software is not permitted, you may include in any such publication or presentation an excerpt of up to fifty (50) lines of code for illustration purposes.", so I'm not sure if I want to look at it anymore.

Regards,
Shikhin

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2014 6:36 pm
by Gigasoft
Well, of course. Were you planning to change a few bits around and publish it as your own?

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:48 am
by shikhin
Hi,
Gigasoft wrote:Well, of course. Were you planning to change a few bits around and publish it as your own?
Um, no, but I was planning to go around, change a few bits, and then publish whatever I did with proper credits to Microsoft (or even just distribute the original version).

Regards,
Shikhin

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 9:09 am
by Antti
A non-serious note: from now on hobby OS developers have to convince people that their projects are not based on Linux or MS-DOS.

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 9:17 am
by Combuster
Knowing the newcomers, any posted derivation from DOS is now probably going to be illegal unless proven otherwise. One good excuse to teach them better design manners from the start :D

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 9:27 am
by Bender
They release the sources when they think it's safe to release them. I see no point in making MS-DOS Closed source, IMO they should even release the sources of MSDOS 7.1, I doubt there's anything useful in there now, when the entire industry is shifting to UEFI. It would even make the life of people who write DOS Emulators easier, NTCDM (NT crap DOS Machine) sucks BTW.

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2014 1:41 pm
by VolTeK
None of it is useful and they know this. You couldn't really make a profit from any of it, much less take any companies over with it

Now if we had windows 2000 source, or any NT kernel source, in their eyes it could be a different story depending on who has it.
Bender wrote:NTCDM (NT crap DOS Machine) sucks BTW
Id like to see you write something better than what they had, ontop of all of the components its had to work with. Not just your jam packed ports, i'm talking an actual system.

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 8:35 am
by qw
DOS sources were published before, though illegally

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 9:25 am
by Bender
@Hobbes: I'd suggest not to give links to such sites, this forum is on US Based servers so I don't know what legal compilcations are involved since I'm not a lawyer. MS-DOS is still copyrighted or not?

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 11:49 am
by Nable
Hobbes wrote:DOS sources were published before, though illegally
One can also find WinNT 4.0 and 5.0 (Win2k) sources, and Win2k3 (even somehow legal WRK version).

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 12:45 pm
by qw
Okay Bender, thanks for pointing it out.

MS-DOS 1.1 and MS-DOS 2.0 source released

Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 7:09 am
by gigaraptor487
Read a bit, wish there was some more comments in 1.1.

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:49 am
by qw
ACK. I think the code is a mess.

Re: MS DOS code made public

Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 7:31 am
by cybek
There are many files we can investigate but we can't simply change it and compile. There's no source for bootloader nor installer.
Anyone tried to compile (assembly) those source files?