Reply #64: and here's a report by a student, ca. 2036 [View All]

[Occulus]

"Microsoft Windows was arguably one of the single most influential software products during the initial development of that industry. Installed on tens of millions of PCs, Windows enabled a level of user interaction which was at the time unsurpassed.

"Today, we still have no idea precisely how that operating system functioned. This is because, despite its currently relative obscurity, the Microsoft Windows source code is still protected under US copyright law. Many analysts point to those restrictions when speaking of the primary reason advancement of operating systems in the early 2000's ground to a halt.

"As Microsoft's OS became more and more complex, supporting more and more pieces of hardware, it became unwieldy due to the many disparate code packages under development beneath the Windows umbrella. Open-source advocates correctly point out that, had Microsoft opened its source code to the rest of the development world, its operating system would likely have continued as a source of innovation and development, as users worldwide would have had the opportunity to contribute to the code base.

"This did not occur, and Microsoft Windows is now relegated to the putrid, festering, abandoned codeheap which also contains such gems as the Commodore 64, the Amiga, and the Tandy of yesteryear."

Your insistence upon profits you have not yet made will be the death of both your own works and the public domain.