Most companies: yes. But I was intrigued by the specific context of the post above:
Mentioning that the idea of Microsoft open-sourcing MS-DOS 6.22 (an OS that is definitely not supported anymore by Microsoft) would be very great for that specific use case, access to source being extremely important, much more apparently than the fact the PC DOS 2000 is still licensed.

As you seems you need something more modern and with source available:
Have you given FreeDOS a try?
I my limited tests (retrogaming) it seems pretty stable and useful, though your embed use case might have different requirement (complex network stack or dedicated hardware interface on ISA cards that has only been validated against a couple of commercial DOS versions)

(I think you meant L C D?)

Yeah, that's what I meant by "blocking/filtering".

Passive LCD have poor refresh rate (won't be easy to precisely track a virtual object).

And if you want to have some resolution/precision, when blocking light, the LCD needs to be on a plane that is focused, so you're back at having big clunky optics in front of the eyes which king of defeats the "lightweight normal size glasses," point of the poster above.

Meaning the LCD will most likely be used to shut the whole outside or mask a large part of it (a whole quadrant).

Not black pixels in the view. And thus any virtual layer superimposed on top of the real world is going to be a "floating luminous ghost", unless you go the Magic Leap way and use a special setup room with dim lights (or unless masking the whole outside).

Also, due to how they work (polarization) LCDs will most often block at least 50% (even in pass-through state), so will not be very usable for interacting with the real-world in low-light conditions.

And it's not a very well done thing, mostly due to the not so stellar resolution even in the middle of the field of view. Works for workload where one doesn't need super fine resolution (e.g.: video editing), but forget about using this with walls of tiny next (not usable for coding, for example).

Another use that some people have experimented and Apple has touted with their "spacial computing" moniker: leaving multiple windows and applet floating virtually around a large real-world space (e.g.: have various control apps for your widgets in the work area, have browser with receipe and cooking timer in your kitchen, etc.) so as you move between real-world space, you get the revelant stuff already open and floating wating for you.

The problem is that, at the price of that Apple asks for the Vision Pro, and at the price one finds electronics on, e.g., AliExpress: for the 3500 bucks that Apple asks for their "Spacial Computer", one can buy 35x sub 100 bucks no-name tablets, and leave actual tablets lying around the real world to have "already opened and ready to use apps" all-over. Meh.

My impression is that this is more like the Newton, when Apple utterly failed at making a succesful portable/pocket computer, to the point that they abandoned the form factor, and it took Palm to teach a lesson in how to actually make a success in that form factor before Apple made another somewhat less lackluster attempt with the iPhone and iPod Touch (after having seen a demo of the Handspring + modem Springboard).

Also Vision Pro doesn't have a killer app.
(The "extra screen while on the move" is very limited in practice due to resolution limitation of VR).
It's clearly more of an early prototype to start exploring the platform, that somehow marketing stumbled upon and decided to push through. As you said it:

Sadly, those pesky physics stand in the way.
(No controllable way to "project black", meaning you need some blocking/filtering;
No practical way to project a picture without at least some optics: all the alternative things - like waveguides - which were tried turned out rather crappy)

There are some attempts at making smaller headsets (e.g.: some like Bigscreen are trying to be as light as an immersive VR can be) or less isolating (e.g.: stuff like Lynx has roughly similar optic to the AVP, but the mask is optional it's also usable with peripheral vision unblocked), but all these are still somewhat clunky, and still cost a lot due to manufacturing scale (compared to, e.g., Quest).
Note that they still cost a fraction of Apple's turd and also weight a lot less.

Because, it's not a fuel?
Yes, demand on lithium is increasing as manufacturer of battery-powered devices ramps-up.

But the lithium in a battery powered device is merely a one time inital affair. Once the battery has been built you don't need any more lithium over the life time of the battery. There's no need to constantly pump more lithium into an EV for it to function.

Contrast this with the fossil fuel pipelines.

That's why switching to EV hasn't had an as dramatic effect on Lithium prices as ICE have had on fossil fuel.
Same reason why even if they EV are more complex to build and manufacturing one has larger climate impact than manufacturing an ICE, ICE's constant guzzling of gas overtakes EV's environmental impact after a couple of years (2 to 3 depending on the local energy mix).

(And similar differences of scale also concern nuclear power generation: yes it needs to "burn" a fissile fuel. But it uses so little of that fissile fuel and it amount for such a minute fraction of the overall cost that even insane fluctuations of prices would barely have any noticeable impact on electricity bills)

...well, if you build a large enough trebuchet...

You sure yawn quite a lot.
Has your doctor checked you for sleep apnea?

Yup, thanks. You the same on your favorite platform.

Nah, sorry.
Am busy having fun with my actual science job.
Not enough time left to pay much attention to eloquent idiots with too much money on their hands.

I am sorry if you're unable to see the difference between moderation and censorship.

Sorry I'm from the otherside of the Atlantic pond (a.k.a. an Evil Euro-Communist), so I didn't get your "Canada" joke.

As a matter of fact, yes I do have a great time on the Fediverse.

I don't feel missing out on Xitter (I haven't used really used that crap in 2023).

Yes, the real world doesn't much care about Xitter. Only a few tiny communities on it care. Do you how often serious largescale marketing and public communication campaign want to include "Xitter influencers"? Answer is never.

They are only interested in the larger players:
- that have 1 or multiple billions users.
- that can publish a little bit more information than an SMS.

(My significant other is a consultant at a company that subcontracts large public communication campaigns, her experience also matches my above statements)

Oh, I am sure the Melon Husk is fine! He is absolutely not going through a divorced dad's midlife crisis, blowing stupidly money on pointless projects that can't be turned profitable, manufacturing a meme-car that would make Homer Simpson's car jealous, torturing apes because he thinks that this will somehow allow him one day to upload his consciousness, etc.
He likes to fancy himself as some kind of genius inventor, but in practice is just a not too bad bullshit artist with way too much money who managed to lucky on a couple of projects (usually by joining late projects that were already on a successful track and pretending he invented them, then eventually pushing his crappy ideas, unless said project have dedicated people at managing the ego of the Melon).
How do you really think he is CEO of several companies? Does he really work 100% at each? Or is he merely the guy with tons of money and tons of connections whose ego needs management?

Xitter was already headed in the direction of becoming a dumpster fire of misinformation, conspiracy theories and a whole rainbow of various forms of hatespeach, before the acquisition and firing of mods. The new CEO has merely started to speed run the enshittification process.

but hey, Xitter is owned by the richest man in the world, he can surely keep losing billions on his new toy without ever turning a profit, right?

oh, poor snowflake, show us where the evil woke moderator hurt you! Oh, did they/them hurt your feelings and your freeze peach?

I merely noticing that over the years Twitter is increasingly full of all of the worst of the gutter of humanity. If you enjoy the crap on Twitter and find it better than before, I guess our interests and values are on polar opposites.

"Mastodon" isn't a social media company, you know, right?
It's a piece of microblogging software (written by Mastodon Gmbh), that one can install on their own server to host microblogging, optionally intercommunicating with other servers who do so.
Whether there is advertisement installed on any same server also running mastodon is entirely left at the discretion of the people who had said server deployed.

Some Mastodon servers decide to only rely on donations. Others might decide to rely on advertisement (Truth Social and Gab are example of servers running mastodon and receiving money from some form of advertisement).

But, no. I doubt that "Mastodon" (As in servers on which Mastodon code is deployed) will "take over" the advertisers of Twitter at any time.

A per your own source, it's 500million pairs of eyeballs.
The same source liste more than a billion for each of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, Linkedin, ...
Even Snapchat has more users. Fucking Snapchat.
X is peanuts.

Oh, poor you! Still didn't get over for that time you got slapped in the face with a large trout when you tried to tweet your opinion about the great replacement?

Yup.

Sucks so much that in fact I'm wondering if CEO John Pettigrew isn't overly optimistic in expecting the current crop of "Just make the datacenter even larger and AGI will surely emerge out of the next 5.0 version of CludeGPT or BingBard or whatever..." money burning bullshit "start-ups" will still be around in 10 years.

On the other hand bullshit like Tesla's "Full Self Driving" has constantly been promised for "next year" for approximately the last decade, so it's not impossible that by 2034 the same usual suspect will still be around, still promising that AGI is just right at the corner if we "just" let them boil of a few more lakes to cool their newest nuclear-powered "Zetta-scale" data center. (While, please, ignoring the Habsburg level of inbreeding of their models due to all the botshit leaked on the internet).

As John Maynard Keynes famously observed: markets can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

No. It was not punitive damage.
Apple dropped their lawsuit and was settled out of court.

(Among other, because if Apple persisted in court, Microsoft was menacing to completely with draw MS-Office from macOS which could have completely killed Apple. So that's why Apple accepted to settle even if in practice they would probably have had a ground to sue. Of course, it was also Microsoft's best interest to settle instead of completely crushing Apple, with all the FTC shenanigans happening).

Technically they didn't get caught stealing they mere were alleged to be stealing, with the lawsuit being dropped.

(Yes, Microsoft probably stole tons of shit as they usually do. They just managed to avoid having a judge confirm it this time.)

Sorry, but you read too fast. I didn't say "invest"(*), I said "investigated":

Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990

Microsoft was in legal troubles due to monopolistic practices.

This is probably what led them to decide to settle out of court and pay those 150$ million you mention (as part of the settlement) rather than try to completely crush Apple. Given the warchest of Microsoft, they could probably have been able to go to court and extended the legal battle for long enough until Apple goes bankrupt and disappears (with Microsoft buying up the remnants).

But doing so (killing off Apple and ingesting it) would probably have looked very bad in their other lawsuit about monopoly. Letting Apple live another day (and, as you point out, spinning the public opinion as "Microsoft investing into Apple to save them!") was probably the smart move to reduce the antitrust troubles.

Regarding the long list of products destroyed by Microsoft's ruthless practices:
Yup. There's a reason why the Microsoft Cuisine joke is so funny: it definitely close to how most of the Microsoft related accident happened back then.

(Was using Stac' Stacker during my DOS days back then).
(Of course a pirated copy, because as a teenagers I was too broke to either afford a bigger disk or even buy the software).

---

(*): though yes, the source I point at does mention the 150$ millions, without expanding on their context (as an out-of-court settlement).

Speculations cross my mind:

One of the explanations I've heard about why Win95 merely only "nearly did kill Apple" instead of "completely killing" it, is that Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990 and definitely needed to still have a somewhat not completely dead Apple around to point at whenever the word "monopoly" came in the discussion. (see: this article)

If Microsoft had launched an Apple-crusher a bit earlier, they would still have launched it during their antitrust lawsuit era, so they would still need to keep Apple on life support.
They would still need to put efforts in keeping Apple alive to avoid getting accused monopoly.