Back in 1995, the Microsoft Kids division of the company released a program called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The same year that the original Toy Story proved that feature-length 3D computer animation was feasible, people could install software on their home computers that could spit out crude-but-creative 3D animated movies at 6 to 8 frames per second.
Aside from releasing Doraemon and Nickelodeon-specific versions of Movie Maker later on, Microsoft never really returned to this software… until now. Microsoft Developer Division Community Manager Scott Hanselman announced yesterday that Microsoft was open-sourcing the code for 3D Movie Maker, posting it to Github in a read-only repository under an MIT license.
Microsoft made some seriously weird products back in the ’90s, and this is definitely one of them. It’s great to see things like this released as open source – these are not the products that set the world on fire, but the idea to get it to compile and run on modern systems will surely spark the imagination of quite a few developers.
This should be a thing. It would be an awesome thing for software historians if all software could become open sourced at the end of it’s commercial life instead of being buried and never seeing the light of day again.
Since we no longer use physical media, I think it may become more difficult for people to revisit their collection of “cloud” apps and movies in the future, especially stuff they’ve purchased from app stores and streaming providers because the online catalogs aren’t permanent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-responds-to-disappearing-itunes-movie-purchases-issue/
I recall zune subscribers having lost their entire catalogs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zune/comments/criidq/recovering_zune_music_library/
This risk keeps increasing as we become more dependent on service providers, Steam seems to be in a healthy state today, but it is still concerning to have so many titles tied to one company’s services and DRM. Incidentally they went offline yesterday temporarily.
https://downdetector.com/status/steam/
Steam is convenient, but I prefer DRM-free competitors like GOG.
Haha, this got O/T, but whenever old software comes up I think about the challenges surrounding archiving digital content that we face these days.
Zune? Unfortunately will not happen. (I am 99% sure). The core technologies are licensed (mp3, aac), and probably have too much 3rd party code.
This one though was a real surprise, though. They just removed the licensed parts, and released it as-is. They even ask for Visual C++ 2.0, because of using older and broken C++ dialect. That being said, there are already 111 forks, and any one of them could be successful.
(And Scott Hanselman has been a genuine supporter of open source technologies).
Steam is a mess. Some games will reinstall from backup without internet others will demand internet and there is no way to tell.
GoG is better if you can get stuff that way and backup the installer.
oiaohm,
I should clarify that by “healthy”, what I meant that the company doesn’t seem to be at a financial risk of going defunct. DRM-wise, they’re putting the industry at a high risk of non-functioning software in the future.
Of course and those titles should continue to be more accessible in the future even after they become commercially obsolete. The mickey mouse copyright laws are a bit ridiculous though for software. Even software for the first digital computers ever built still have a lot more years to go before they’ll become public domain.
Alfman,
If I recall correctly, at one point in the past, they had a clause for Steam going defunct. However I could not find it today. Probably it was a measure when they were small, but don’t hold it today.
The bigger issue is they allow “3rd party DRM”. While Steam itself is a DRM, it is “better” relative to the others. As oiaohm pointed out, that causes offline / online division between different games in the system. Worse, some would even limit number of total installs. Buy a game 10 years ago, replace PC every two years? The game you paid for will no longer install.
Anyway, everyone going GoG is unfortunately will not happen.. Game publishers are too afraid about piracy, even though it has not been a huge impact for decades.
sukru,
I do remember Gabe Newell making a public statement to that effect, but AFAIK it was just a talking point and there was never a contract. Most likely steam would not outright disappear but get bought out. New owners would decide what to do with DRM properties. In short I don’t think it’s was ever a reliable assumption. And in a similar vein it isn’t safe to assume that content bought from any of the so called “cloud providers” will be reliable either when the businesses backing them loose interest.
I know it’s the same old battle lines.
This is incidental, but at work we experienced a breakage of microsoft’s Visual Studio licensing service, which resulted in many of our developers not being able to build older projects. It was an MS licensing bug that got resolved because the version of visual studio is still supported, but suppose this happens and MS isn’t willing to support it, that poses a serious threat for those relying on proprietary build chains to support their own software. I think it’s dangerous that so much of the world is at the mercy of remote activation servers even to use our local computers and software. And at least with microsoft things are getting worse, like end users forced have online account requirements in windows 11. When everything is a service, we become far more dependent on corporations to use our computers. Alas that’s their goal. Whether it’s computers, phones, cars, tractors, etc, soon enough almost everything with a CPU can be at the mercy of someone else in control.
Alfman,
The Visual Studio issue is interesting. The versions I had back in the day did not even do a license activation, but just worked from the installer. (Except for MSDN online services).
It has been a while though. Apparently things have changed.
sukru,
Yeah, even the free community edition phones home now….
https://pupuweb.com/solved-visual-studio-community-license-expired-evaluation-period-ended/
For us it was the enterprise version. It’s a black box to me, I don’t know all the triggers and timing conditions but it’s programmed to eventually lock you out if phoning home fails for too long. In our case though the license service was connecting and it was caused by a licensing bug. An update from MS fixed it.
Needless to say I’m not a fan of intentional failure modes.
Alfman,
Okay, that makes sense.
They recently had a problem with the Xbox live licensing servers. And people could not play their games.
Apparently the “Game Pass” subscription only works 30 days offline, before needing to phone home:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/usage-rules-for-digital-goods-rules-83812b1f-1ecd-9a46-d3a7-ad1eadce49d1
Probably something similar with Visual Studio then.
hi