Holy balls!

Except those versions are so ancient it hardly seems worth getting excited about, except in principle.

Indeed. MS-DOS6.22 source code with a permissive non-commercial license would be amazing for dosbox/freedos/etc.
Nice to see Microsoft become a bit more "hip" though.

Jarvik7 wrote:

Indeed. MS-DOS6.22 source code with a permissive non-commercial license would be amazing for dosbox/freedos/etc.
Nice to see Microsoft become a bit more "hip" though.

It's not a matter of being hip, it's a matter of them having all this code that they squeezed every last penny out of so they figured they'd release it for publicity purposes. Windows 9 is coming up soon, so they want the public to remember them for something good so they all buy it like good little minions. They don't want another mass rejection of a major release like with Vista and 8.

sliderider wrote:

Windows 9 is coming up soon, so they want the public to remember them for something good so they all buy it like good little minions. They don't want another mass rejection of a major release like with Vista and 8.

The number of "good little minions" who care about open source at all, much less open source from thirty (?) years ago, is a vanishingly small proportion.

From what I gathered, Microsoft didn't proactively release this source in some marketing effort. Someone had a copy in their attic, asked for permission to release it, and got an OK.