What are the license terms of Microsoft products that are no longer supported?

Question

What are the license terms of Microsoft products that are no longer supported? Like Windows 98 or Microsoft Money?

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.)