A silly new app has been doing the rounds this week: Windows 95 as a standalone application. Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the Windows 95 "app" combines Electron (a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript and other Web technology) with an existing x86 emulator written in JavaScript. The emulator can run a bunch of operating systems: for the app, it's preloaded with Windows 95.
This is, of course, software piracy. The developer of the app has no rights to distribute Windows 95 like this, and I'm a little surprised that the app hasn't been yanked from GitHub yet. And for now, the app is just a toy; there's no real reason to run Windows 95 like this, other than the novelty factor of it actually working.
But Windows 95 (and software that runs on or requires Windows 95) was an important piece of computing history. I think a case could be made that it's Microsoft's most important Windows release of all time, and its influence continues to be felt today. Not only was it technically important as an essential stepping stone from the world of 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.x to 32-bit Windows NT, and not only did it introduce a user interface that's largely stayed with us for more than 20 years—Windows 95 was also a major consumer event as people lined up to buy the thing as soon as it was available. A full understanding of the computing landscape today can't really be had without running, using, and understanding Windows 95.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @05:29PM (3 children)
Windows 95 is so old as to be totally obsolete. It's only real purpose today is running software that is also so old that it's unsupported. Why isn't this in the public domain yet? It's not like you can still buy it from Microsoft, so they don't even lose any money from redistribution.
With copyright terms lasting over a century (and growing) will any software ever enter the public domain while it's still useful? Will any software enter the public domain while the hardware still exists to run it? Will any software ever enter the public domain at all?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday August 26 2018, @05:41PM
Perhaps it's a conspiracy between Disney and Congress to make people try Wine or ReactOS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @04:23AM
because if it were actually public domain, someone could make it useful again (such as to run on modern systems, or to bolster the efforts of the WINE project), and MS doesn't want that
That's it. Modern copyright law is designed to ensure that works only really benefit the creator (or rather, the rightsholder, since it's very rarely the creator who gets control these days regarding high-profile works), which is entirely contrary to why copyright (at least in the US) was instituted.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Monday August 27 2018, @12:41PM
Don't forget all those ATMs that still run it.