On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 12:07 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > But I'll see if I can ask someone at Microsoft about it. My guess is > that they provide the download because they don't care about it > anymore, and no one thought to create a web page for it.
That's my guess. Copyright normally becomes an issue when there is money on the table (or someone thinks there might be.) Word for DOS hasn't been sold for ages. *MSDOS* hasn't been sold as a separate product for ages. Who at MS is going to *care* that you can now get it free? It's not like they're losing money because you can. The stuff people will actually *pay* for all moved to the Windows side decades ago. Do you technically need a license? Perhaps. Is anyone going to come after you if you *don't* have one?" Vanishingly unlikely. People bring suit on stuff like this to protect rights and revenue streams. MS rights are not in danger here, and there hasn't been a revenue stream for this in many years. Bringing suit costs time, effort, and money. Why would MS *bother*? Their legal staff has better things to do with their time. FreeDOS is open source, and along that line, wants all software available with FreeDOS or from its repository on Ibiblio to be open source. So having MS Word for DOS 5.5 on Ibiblio would be inappropriate, but I don't personally see a reason the FreeDOS website couldn't provide a pointer to it elsewhere, as "software not open source but freely available that you can run under FreeDOS" > Jim ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
