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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

How does this work with the licensing? It runs in your browser, so you need a valid license and not the host?

They have a disclaimer: https://bellard.org/jslinux/disclaimer.html

> "All commercial support for Windows 2000 ended on 2010-07-11 so we believe it does not harm its copyright holder(s) to keep it online."

I doubt MS agrees.

> "It is published for digital preservation and demonstration purposes only."

But on the other hand it could be used for other purposes (such as for avoiding paying windows license to run windows programs), so I again doubt MS will agree.

It’s up to copyright holders to enforce their copyright. They can choose at any time to start or stop or restart doing so, for any reason, as long as the term of the copyright has not expired.

I’ll say this, if someone made a prediction market, I’d put down $10 on 70% odds that Microsoft won’t try and enforce in this case. They’re trying to reach out to developers these days, and suing Fabrice over this interesting project would piss off a lot of developers. But I accept the 30% odds that they may just pursue enforcement anyway.

In my opinion, Fabrice Bellard showing a VM in HTML5/JS with Windows 2000 is a great honor for Microsoft, not a harm at all, quite the contrary :-)

Can you even get a license for Win2000 anymore... ? I expect no license from that era would consider a scenario like this anyway.

It's a bit of a clusterfuck [1] but you can buy a license to a newer version of Windows and exercise downgrade rights if you've got your old Windows 2000 media and product keys around, or something:

> It is also important to understand that although Microsoft grants downgrade rights we do not necessarily provide the means (media and product keys) to downgrade. So what does this mean? In order to downgrade software you will need the bits of the earlier version or edition and a product key. Microsoft only supplies bits and product keys to Volume License customers and only for certain versions and editions of the software. Volume Licensing customers have access to the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) where they will have access to the current version and the prior version of the software they have licensed. We refer to the current version of software as version “n” and the prior version of the software as n-1. There are also certain core Microsoft products that we provide n-2 and occasionally n-3 versions of the software via the VLSC. Software titles where n-2 and n-3 versions are available can be viewed here. If you have legally obtained physical media for earlier Microsoft products that your organization is currently licensed to use through downgrade rights, you may use that media for downgrades.

And in fact, despite it being Windows Server 2000 you can exercise downgrade rights from Windows 10 Pro [2]. All the way back to Windows NT 3.51!

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/licensing/2013/02/06/dow...

[2] https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-...

Isn't Windows 2000 the only one where Microsoft doesn't distribute the media anywhere, because of Java?

Right. When I last checked, you can get as low as Windows 3.1 from MSDN.. but not 2000.

Whether a vendor offers any kind of licensing for a software product and whether a vendor still has active copyright are two different matters.

If a vendor refuses to offer a license for a reasonable sum perhaps the law should allow a petition to relinquish the copyright and place the work in the public domain, the petition going to the relevant authority (the UK IP Office comptroller probably in the UK?).

Or just let Google bypass the law and no-one else, as happened with orphaned books.

Perhaps it should, but currently it certainly does not; the copyright holder has the exclusive right to offer this product, and if they choose not to do so, noone else can.

That gets really fuzzy though, as I'm sure there's components in Windows 10 that's also present in Windows 2000. Are they required to relinquish those to the public domain as well?

I did have a customer asking if my software would run on Windows 2000 recently.

Now you know why; He wanted to run it in the browser.

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