Now's your chance everybody: Someone has uploaded the source code to GitHub, no torrent needed now. If you want to be the first unauthorized person to ever file a PR against Windows, you have the opportunity.
Anyone else think the smartest move for microsoft here is to leave it up, unless another copyright holder complains?
Not only has XP been sunset many times, many years ago, it might finally have all of its bugs picked clean and unofficial patches made to shore up any systems too embedded to move off XP still.
It's probably not all that useful for that, to be honest. People building this are setting their clocks to sometime 2003 because something in the process is timebombed (including the resulting build). SP3 was 2008. Support officially ended 2014. Patches for wannacry snuck out in 2017 & 2019.
So if people want to take this tree as a base to start releasing unofficial patches, they have 16 years of work to catch-up on just to reach parity.
Possibly, yeah. But I think they'd benefit more from the official updates.
I'm not trying to argue that unofficial patches would be a bad thing. I just don't think a source tree from 2003 is a good place to start. Any binary you build off this codebase will be missing 16 years of microsoft's patches. Until such a project caught up with all the changes made 2003-2019, any binary you build off this is likely to cause more harm than good (eg, you fix one issue, and reintroduce every issue that was fixed after 2003.)
The idea's good. This sourcetree isn't. Let's just say 2003 was not XP's golden age. If this was at least SP3 onwards, but preferably 2014+, sure. But it's not, it's SP1.
It's possible as long as Microsoft removes all code commissioned by third parties, rewrites all copyright and trademark statements and explicitly licenses the very release that got leaked. Anything else could be seen as non-action in case of a software leak which could lead to very unfortunate results in any lawsuits that come up.
That's a lot of work for what is essentially a gross intellectual property violation as well as a leak of trade secrets.
Tk protect your trademark, you absolutely must go after trademark violations. Any build labeled "Windows" that results from this source code must be taken down if Microsoft wants to keep the trademark on things like "Windows".
Conspiracy theory time: Microsoft intentionally leaked this code so they can gear up to fully open sourcing all of Windows and crowd sourcing its development and bug fixing.
It makes sense, I don't think MS cares about Windows anymore in the azure/O365 era.
It makes sense, they have very little to lose other than the glarimg issue that even with a non-free license it would inevitably end up being used to run Office on Linux via syscall or full emulation.
Maybe they're testing the waters? Perhaps there's a political problem with open-sourcing a current product that nearly every company has sunk a sizeable amount of revenue into?
Yes it is totally outlandish. This was leaked, not open sourced. No one is going to seriously contribute to a project that can't be legally distributed.
The kernel source code (NTOS) was available for years through an academic program[1], it was easily findable on emule/edonkey/torrent. IIRC, the implementation of NTFS was not included. This leak is the full source code of Windows XP, both kernel and userland (+50 Gigabytes).
I also remember Windows source code leaking in the early 2000s. I even downloaded it myself back then but that was many computers ago.
And afaik it was not buildable. It was a large chunk of the source code that iirc had leaked from a 3rd party who was tasked with making some component, perhaps related to the image library.
I've heard for years that it was floating around, and saw some torrents that claimed to be the XP source, but I've never downloaded it myself to find out.
