Well, mentioning what Borland did is a good shot.
I signed.

    I don't know why this is still such a big issue for two big reasons.   
    One:  Numorous sites have all versions of qbasic avalible with onsite letters from microsoft stating that they do not care about people downloading qbasic for free even pds  7.1.
    Two:  Unless you are some kind of complete legal freak.  You can download it for free off of many sites.   And, the sheer mass of sites with downloads should be fairly obvious proof the microsoft is not too worried.

For reason two I will probably be banned, but that is how I look at things.

hey, i thought i might be banned for starting this topic, but here i am! :D

quebasic2,
>One:  Numorous sites have all versions of qbasic avalible with onsite letters from microsoft stating that they do not care about people downloading qbasic for free even pds  7.1.

Please give me a link to one of such letters. I'll print it out and hang to the wall.

>Two:  Unless you are some kind of complete legal freak.  You can download it for free off of many sites.   And, the sheer mass of sites with downloads should be fairly obvious proof the microsoft is not too worried.

This is just to "get something off one's conscience".
Conscience is very strange matter, you know ;)

Please, Please use correct terms.
Qbasic was distributed with MS-DOS starting with version 5.0. It is basically freeware as it was included with the
OS up through win98.

QuickBasic on the other hand is an enhanced version QBasic  (with a better IDE though similar) that includes a compiler for stand-alone and runtime exe's, use of libraries,etc.