Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source

MS-DOS 4.00 code, binaries, disk images, and documentation now available.

8 comments

But not 5.0 yet - they still got critical proprietary stuff in EDIT and SMARTDRV.SYS that they don’t want their competitors to get a hold of.
- I wonder if they licensed the source of 5.0+ to someone and are still getting paid for it. If so, it's probably something ubiquitous and critical that nobody would think of like traffic lights or water treatment plants.
  
  I think that is likely since 3.3 wasn't included either and that is one of those versions people stuck with for ages.
- According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.
Did anyone manage to build this? It seems something is missing, or I am doing something wrong. The build fails due to missing symbols for me. Also, interestingly the assembler complained about one line in a certain file being too long. Fortunately that lines was just a comment, so it was easy to fix that.
- This explains it, although it is not really Git's fault as that article suggests, but rather the charset conversions to UTF-8 that broke things. With all that fixed it builds fine. I've been using DOSBOX and since all the required build tools are included in the repo, it is easy to build.
I wonder if FreeDOS will find this release useful at all.
And they spectacularly fucked up the release. Doesn't compile, and they hurriedly edited stuff including comments calling the original DOS creator "brain-dead".

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