Source Code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows

Microsoft released source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows this week with the Computer History Museum.

On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time.

Without reading the whole press release, you might think of it as Microsoft’s new move towards getting into the open source community. Actually the intent is good, but it’s not making them open source:

Thanks to the Computer History Museum, these important pieces of source code will be preserved and made available to the community for historical and technical scholarship.

As I said the intent is good, but this effort might have been more meaningful maybe 15 years ago. People could have learned many things from their work and they could have used them in their fields. Who knows, maybe we would have had better word processors by now.

Of course, this is about their marketing strategy, and I don’t blame them for this. I don’t really think they are evil. They have some good efforts. Besides Microsoft didn’t kill my pappy, not yet.

You can grab source codes of MS-DOS and Word for Windows from the Computer History Museum’s website.