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posted by
Fnord666
on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:06AM
from the all-your-code-belongs-to-us dept.
from the all-your-code-belongs-to-us dept.
Someone leaked a large amount of sourcecode that may or may not be the complete source code to Windows XP, NT, CE and a few DOS versions. Microsoft won't confirm or deny if it's the actual code.
The source code for Windows XP SP1 and other versions of the operating system was allegedly leaked online today.
The leaker claims to have spent the last two months compiling a collection of leaked Microsoft source code. This 43GB collection was then released today as a torrent on the 4chan forum.
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Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and
the instruction afterward.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @07:09PM
With all these versions of their code out, it doesn't make any sense for them to keep obsolete versions of windows subject to a proprietary license except and unless they are trying to protect their current OS monopoly because, for example, Windows 10 is actually considered inferior by most users and given a chance to have security fixes backported to Windows XP by a team of volunteer developers they would actually find themselves losing marketshare to their own obsolete OSes, while also seeing OEM PC sales decline as more people realize they can do just fine on older hardware, or buy lower end modern hardware and get the same level of performance out of it as a much higher end modern PC running Windows 10 (or 7 or Vista).
Having used XP, XP x64, 2k3, Vista, 7, the public beta of 8, and 10, I can tell you out of all of them, only XP, XP x64, and to a lesser extent Windows 7 didn't suck, particularly in keeping a clear and consistent user interface that i was productive in. That being said, XP x64 had a number of flaws in the memory subsystem that would cause it to grind to a halt if you had the wrong applications running (Not sure if it was a specific application memory model or all of them) and would require a reboot to get the system back to its initial login level of performance (and no logging out and back in as another or the same user wouldn't solve it.)
Given Microsoft's claimed newfound love of open source, they shouldn't have any trouble putting their money where their mouth is and auditing the leaked code for 3rd party claims so that it can be released royalty free and for the public good, right? :-)
We will however see BSA DMCA takedown notices all over, as happened with the NT3.5 repo that was up on https://github.com/AR1972/NT3.5 [github.com] a while back. Interesting that someone could both be in Github/Microsoft's Arctic Vault program, and also have a DMCA takedown against them for illegal publishing of Microsoft Proprietary Source Code, isn't it?