Sure, you just need a team of 10000 engineers about 30 years.

They are still far from releasing later MS-DOS versions or first Windows. Still would like it to happen. I'm not sure Windows 3.1 would get a lot of interest from devs as it would need a huge amount of work to be modernized. But if they went on to release 95, 98, ME or NT, 2000, XP I'm sure community versions would show up.

Is it possible? I think it is. Windows is getting less important as a source of income for Microsoft.

I was thinking about that too, the other day. Why not release the source code to Windows 3.x at this point? What could possibly be in there that would still give Microsoft a competitive edge to keep secret?

Any patents on it have expired and it's way too old to help competitors in developing competing products in any meaningful way.

One argument could be that they might not own the rights to all of the sources, but wasn't that more of a problem with Windows NT, when they worked closely with IBM in the initial stages of OS/2 development?

And even if IBM owns any of the rights to Windows 3.x sources, I don't see why they would object to those sources being released.

At this point, it's becoming more valuable for Microsoft to actually release the sources, for the purposes of historic preservation.

The same could be said for MS-DOS versions of which Microsoft still hasn't released the sources at the time I'm writing this (MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0 and 6.x).

IBM has rights on Windows 3.1x, too, I vaguely remember.

sometime in 2004, portions of windows 2000 and NT 4.0 was leaked online..vulnerabilities discovered and used by malware in both systems increased in the weeks and months after the leak. In 2020, XBOX and XBOX 360 source code, which is based on a modified Windows 2000 was also leaked online. around the same year XP code was also posted online and MS-DOS versions 3.30 and 6.0

myne wrote on 2025-11-27, 15:18:

Sure, you just need a team of 10000 engineers about 30 years.

Or 10 for 3 years if you just fix memory leaks and addressing so in standard mode 286 virtual memory through 1gb works without running out of “resources “
Ditto for flat32 &Win32
Then fix fat32 support.

Done if you can make a stable barebones OS that has virtually no acceleration, security, APIs , DirectX or any of the other crutches created for subsequent WinOSs you have a nice low resource blank slate with no drivers or services to accelerate anything.

digger wrote on 2025-11-27, 15:41:

Any patents on it have expired and it's way too old to help competitors in developing competing products in any meaningful way.

Might be more hassle than it's worth when spurious litigants start claiming they can find their code in there - à la SCO and Linux which dragged on for 18 years. MicroSoft knows all about fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

I also wish that one day it would be possible to boot Windows 3.11 on FreeDOS, without the limitations that have prevented it from running on that system for several years, without having to patch anything. In the meantime, I'll have to continue using DOS 7.1 from Win98. I know it's unfair, but that's how it is now, and this has been going on for quite a few years without being resolved, only until the Win3.1x source code is released.

rmay635703 wrote on 2025-11-27, 18:26:

Or 10 for 3 years if you just fix memory leaks and addressing so in standard mode 286 virtual memory through 1gb works without r […]
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myne wrote on 2025-11-27, 15:18:

Sure, you just need a team of 10000 engineers about 30 years.

Or 10 for 3 years if you just fix memory leaks and addressing so in standard mode 286 virtual memory through 1gb works without running out of “resources “
Ditto for flat32 &Win32
Then fix fat32 support.

Done if you can make a stable barebones OS that has virtually no acceleration, security, APIs , DirectX or any of the other crutches created for subsequent WinOSs you have a nice low resource blank slate with no drivers or services to accelerate anything.

They said modern.

No one cares much about reactos.

Even here where you might expect the open source nature and probably broader compatibility to be appreciated.

I'm thinking there is also the possibility of discovering really dirty hacks and terrible code, that the whole code release thing becomes defamatory for the company. Not specifically for Windows 3.x but for any old product (since the company had grew significantly and many people were involved).

konc wrote on Yesterday, 08:06:

I'm thinking there is also the possibility of discovering really dirty hacks and terrible code, that the whole code release thing becomes defamatory for the company. Not specifically for Windows 3.x but for any old product (since the company had grew significantly and many people were involved).

Maybe, i think the reason it wont be released though is more to do with effort. the code for a full build may not be that tidily organised, it would take some time and probably some legal review to release it - even if that's modest its still needs to get attention in the business, have some kind of project and oversight and allocations of people. Probably all very small scale, but still its enough not to get done

if it was though - people will rebuild it and play around for a year, and then lose interest because there just isn't much need out there for an updated windows 3.x, at least i don't think there would be

myne wrote on Yesterday, 01:28:

No one cares much about reactos.

Even here where you might expect the open source nature and probably broader compatibility to be appreciated.

At least it doesn't contain spyware, that's positive. ^^

gerry wrote on Yesterday, 10:11:

if it was though - people will rebuild it and play around for a year, and then lose interest because there just isn't much need out there for an updated windows 3.x, at least i don't think there would be

Windows 3.x had been rebuilt in the form of Win3mu years ago, sort of.
Then there was WABI, a compatibility layer of the 90s that ran Windows 3.1x on *nix.
Then there was Microsoft WLO/Micrografx Mirrors that provided Windows 3.0 core libraries on OS/2.

Last but not least, the 16-Bit Windows API had been almost standardized as an ANSI norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_(sof ... on_attempt

So at least in the 90s, 16-Bit Windows was of relevance.

konc wrote on Yesterday, 08:06:

I'm thinking there is also the possibility of discovering really dirty hacks and terrible code, that the whole code release thing becomes defamatory for the company. Not specifically for Windows 3.x but for any old product (since the company had grew significantly and many people were involved).

I think hacks were a thing in the past when system resources were generally scarce, that great efforts are needed to make code that would run at reasonable speed on most machines people owned at that time. On the other hand, hacks may be introduced if standard approaches at that time were broken, or could not achieve the desired results.

Since these are not standard (and potentially unsafe) approaches they are very prone to breakage at a later point. Windows' compatibility options (since WinXP) existed for the very reason to keep certain software, that relied on such hacks (or unsafe behaviors) for proper operation, working as they should on earlier Windows versions.

gerry wrote on Yesterday, 10:11:

Maybe, i think the reason it wont be released though is more to do with effort. the code for a full build may not be that tidily organised, it would take some time and probably some legal review to release it - even if that's modest its still needs to get attention in the business, have some kind of project and oversight and allocations of people. Probably all very small scale, but still its enough not to get done

Winamp was a good example of how things could end up if not handled seriously...

And I recall there were calls to open source OS/2 back then, and one of the roadblocks was the code that were originally Microsoft's. Still, unofficial efforts, such as osFree, do exist.

gerry wrote on Yesterday, 10:11:

if it was though - people will rebuild it and play around for a year, and then lose interest because there just isn't much need out there for an updated windows 3.x, at least i don't think there would be

Personally I still liked the old way of minimizing MDI childs to icons instead of small ugly titlebars. This is something unique to Win3.x that is no longer possible since Win9X, and special code has to be written to achieve some of that.

On the other hand, it seems Wine also had such ability to some extent that at one time caused a regression for ReactOS. I did read somewhere that Wine once supported emulating Win3.x in the past but I doubt this is possible now with current Wine versions on modern Linux distros...

They will never release something someone could use to make a better OS than Windows 11.

Big Pink wrote on 2025-11-27, 19:19:

Might be more hassle than it's worth when spurious litigants start claiming they can find their code in there - à la SCO and Linux which dragged on for 18 years. MicroSoft knows all about fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

That's a plausible reason, yeah.

That's also why Linux took off in the first place. BSD was stuck in legal limbo in the early 90s because of a lawsuit by AT&T.

Still, if it's just Microsoft and IBM who own the rights to the source code, why won't they jointly release it? They could just leave out any parts that they don't own the rights to. That's how Sun Microsystems open-sourced Java. They left out some proprietary code, notably for lesser used features such as MIDI playback. And the open source community was quick to replace those excluded parts in what eventually was released as OpenJDK.

The other possible reason I've seen people mention here, potential embarrassment due to ugly code, seems a bit less plausible to me. At the time, system resources were much more constrained than they are today, and on top of that, Microsoft had to resort to all manners of trickery to juggle performance with broad downwards compatibility, to the extent where such hacks were actually impressive.

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog includes some really fascinating examples of the crazy stuff they had to do to make things magically work almost everywhere.

Lualb wrote on 2025-11-27, 15:14:

Hi!

A topic I've been wanting to discuss with you for a very long time is the hypothetical case where Microsoft decides to release the source code for Windows 3.1. So, what do you think you could do with it? ... Could you create a free and modern operating system based on 3.1x?

Windows 3.1 isn't an operating system, it's a shell. Also, you'd need to modify it so heavily it effectively becomes something entirely new. Windows 11 is fine for me and there's Linux for those who don't like it. The only reason I'd be interested in the source is just have some fun with it. Also, Windows 3.1x can be extended and modified rather extensively with messing with its source, but probably not enough to make it acceptable as a modern os. If the source is ever going to be released expect to wait at least several more decades, at least that is what I think.

It would cost quite a lot of money and man-hours to prepare the code for release, mainly sorting out all the various licenses etc. Why would MS spend that money for basically zero benefit?

Peter Swinkels wrote on Yesterday, 18:49:

Windows 3.1 isn't an operating system, it's a shell.

Yes, in very simplified terms. In about same amount that Windows 95 is a shell. ;)

(Long story: Win3 has a scheduler, message-based multitasking, its own memory managment, a printer spooler, a V86 monitor in 386 Enhanced-Mode, its own executable format etc pp.)

(PS: Oh, and WABI runs the Windows 3.1 386 kernal directly on *nix, without DOS.
DOS applications require DOSemu or something else to be run from WABI.)

Hello! I've been reading your comments, and I really appreciate each one. I'd like to add something: As you'll notice, Windows 3.1 is a very flexible operating environment compared to Windows 9x. If you install DOS 7.10 on a USB drive and type "WIN", it will automatically boot into Windows 3.1 without much trouble. So, Windows 3.1 is pre-optimized to boot on modern hardware with BIOS support and a fairly fast CPU—things that, for example, Windows 95 or 98 wouldn't do, and if they did, they would quickly break.