What are the license terms of Microsoft products that are no longer supported? Like Windows 98 or Microsoft Money?
4 Answers
Many Microsoft products that have reached end-of-life continue to be sold as part of an MSDN subscription. For instance, Windows 3.1 (released in 1992), MS-DOS (1981), Office 95 (1995), and Visual Basic 2.0 (1992) can all still be purchased in this fashion.
Unlike most abandonware, where the company that sells the products are long gone, Microsoft is of course still around to enforce their copyrights. Therefore, use of their software is still governed under the End User License Agreement those products were shipped with.
While I doubt they'll be adding Windows Genuine Advantage activation features to Windows 3.1, if you're caught using unlicensed Microsoft software in a business setting, you'll certainly still face stiff penalties no matter how old the software is.
If you want to legally acquire such software, check places like eBay, other sites that sell used software, or your local flea market or thrift store. You can also purchase an MSDN subscription if the software you want is included with that (Excel XLSX).
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1An msdn subscription doesn't cover commercial use of any of the included software. I know that some windows licences cover using old versions of the software. Some claims that it always does but that hasn't been tried in court as far as I know. Jun 6, 2020 at 6:19
See this post on Abandonware from Wikipedia:
Abandonware are discontinued products for which no product support is available, or whose copyright ownership may be unclear for various reasons. Abandonware may be computer software or physical devices which are usually computerised in some fashion, such as personal computer games, productivity applications, utility software, or mobile phones.
Consider giving the article a deeper read...Also consider checking out Microsoft's own website (thanks @Linker3000).
This in no way, shape, or form states Microsoft's license terms on their old products - just a general read for your information.
Admittance of "no support", is also legal grounds for claims of "confessed abandonment". Like leaving your car on the side of the road and filing an admittance of abandonment form, such as "being totaled". You may still have rights and obligations to the vehicle, but you no longer have any rights to enforce legal-claims against anyone who tampers with that vehicle, from that point in time.
Placing an ad in a newspaper for that item to be sold, which you have publicly and legally admitted to, as being "unsupported", or "abandoned", does not return or extend any of those rights back to you.
However, they are the only ones who can "legally give selling rights for any windows software", as per the copyrights which they still hold. They have rarely ever enforced the "sale and distribution of second-hand software", and there have only been a few enforced "distributions of illegal software", from microsoft. (They tend to focus on people distributing millions of copies, and the legal copyrights are more for the "businesses" and "corporations", which will not allow anything other than "legally obtained software rights".)**
** This is mostly the logo and some co-dependant code which microsoft still has rights to. Since the language still exists as VBA, much of the actual code is still protected, but they give that away for free, to "USE", which includes use for compiling code. (You just can't make a MYVB6 program with their code, as a MSVB6 replacement program, and then try to sell it as the "New Microsoft VB6".)
Some guy, sitting at home, using an abandoned and unsupported program to make programs that no-one may ever see... Totally not a concern of microsoft at all.
If you want to play the legal-loop-hole... Post the code as open-source and let anyone-else compile it. Then simply download the compiled version. (They will have no idea who actually compiled it, even if you compile it yourself. It is not like it attaches your license info to the compiled code.)
Legally, if you have the registration-code, you can obtain the software from any source you desire. You have the "rights" to that software.
That is why they can't say you are doing anything illegal, when simply downloading a torrent or file... They don't have proof that you DON'T have rights to download it, and that is against the law to even imply, without actual proof that you don't have the rights. (Innocent until proven guilty. Only a judge can order an actual legal "cease and desist order", which actually requires that proof to be presented. Any other warning is just letters on scrap paper. Even directly from your ISP, or Microsoft themselves.)
An MSDN Subscription covers use for development and testing. It doesn't cover commercial usage.
The legal status of abandonware has not been tested in court. The claim is that when a product is no longer available for purchase the copyright no longer applies. This may be true but we don't have code cases to be certain.
The only way that we will know the legal status of Abandonware is if someone start for example selling computers with windows 3.11 or 95. If Microsoft do nothing about it well they have to act within some limited amount of time. The best thing that can happen is that they do sue and it gets taken to court. Then we have the chance of getting clarifications from the legal system.
The legal opinion we have is to make clones. FreeDOS is a clone of Microsoft DOS. Dosbox emulates DOS as well as the hardware required to run it (faster than running DOS in a PC emulator). FreeBASIC is a clone of QuickBasic. Wine is a compatibility layer that run many Windows applications on various current operating system. ReactOS is an open source implementation of Windows 2003. Lazarus is an implementation of Delphi. These all have various degrees of completeness.
There are no effort to clone Windows 95 as far as I know. Nor is there any attempt to clone Microsoft Money. The closest you have to Windows 95 would be Wine.
ReactOS regularly do fundraising. But the interest in having a Windows NT revival has not been sufficient to obtain the amount of resources required to make it even close to replace Any version of Windows XP.
To make a clone of Microsoft Money would actually not cost that much. It's far easier than making ReactOS, Wine or even FreeDOS.
Not being a Microsoft product Lazarus is still worth mentioning. It's an implementation of Turbo Pascal/Delphi. It has an Object Pascal compiler that's very capable and supports more platforms than the current version of Delphi. And instead of the Visual Class Library (VCL) it has the Lazarus Class Library (LCL). As many other open source clone it lacks many of the Delphi features but has the advantage of running on many platforms and compiling code to even more.
This is what I would do if I really wanted to replace Windows 95 and Microsoft Money. For Windows 95 I would just drop that. I would take another OS and modify it to have the required features and software. For it to be legal you must clone all the Windows 95 software that you want to run so you don't need to be compatible.
Now the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero should have been more than sufficient hardware for a Windows 95 clone. So if striving for low cost hardware that's what I would go for. This means that Linux would have to be slimmed down to run as well as windows 95 would have run. That will cost but not as much as making a new OS from Scratch.
Then id use Lazarus and make a Windows Shell replacement that run on Linux. This would replicate the look and feel of the product. Potentially Wine can be used to run ARM PE binaries so it's possible to make the experience very close to Windows.
As for Microsoft Money that could rather easily be cloned with Lazarus. While Lazarus cannot make Windows 95 compatible binaries as it requess Unicode well there are two approaches for this. If you really want Windows 95 support then this must first be implemented in Lazarus. Probably by implementing the missing Unicode support which wouldn't be to difficult. Or you just drop that and support the many platforms that Lazarus so support. I would estimate that hiring good freelancers to do this would cost less that $100k. That's not free but you then have an unlimited license. So you can sell copies of your clone or publish it as free open source software.
There are also other options like using Java, Delphi, C# etc. But some of these options may leave you without currentat and supported development tools at some point in the future. Have is open source but Delphi isn't and C# is partially open source. C++ and Qt may actually be the best option for long term support although it will increase the initial development cost.