Time for Microsoft to open source at MS-DOS
 

What would Steve Ballmer say?

Early Microsoft OS developer David Plummer has told his YouTube viewers that he thinks it is time that Vole open source MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows.

Plummer started his career working as an intern at MS-DOS working for Ben Slivka. He wrote a bunch of major features, like the Smart Drive cache for CD-ROMs.

He wrote DISKCOPY, making it work, single pass, bunch of features in MS-DOS. He re-wrote Setup to work on a single floppy disk by using deltas and patching in place, DOS 5 to turn it into DOS 6, something like, or maybe it was DOS 6 into 6.2.

Plummer said that he did not think there was any reason to hold back any of MS-DOS at this point. They have absolutely no reason not to open source any of it, really — other than PR, because all it brings them is potential liability, complaints and angst, and probably nothing positive for putting the code out there and exposing it to ridicule.

“It's ancient code at this point. It's like, "Ha! Look what Microsoft did!" Well, yeah, I know Linux is cool now, but go look at Linux code from 1991 — and I worked on some of that code. Well, '93 I did. It's not the same as what you see today”, he said.

https://fudzilla.com/news/52919-time...urce-at-ms-dos