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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

So, what happened to the circulating source? Is it still out there?

I went to the nautical-themed torrent site, typed "windows 2000 source", and it returned one result uploaded in 2006 with 6 seeders, so I assume yes (but I haven't downloaded, so I don't know if it's real or a fake).

It's real

Yes it still is. I found both the NT 4 leak and the Windows 2000 leak while I was doing some research into the Windows kernel.

Lots of cool stuff in both; the NT 4 leak had a lot more of the cool kernel stuff, like a DEC Alpha HAL.

I don’t recall the links and won’t share them. I also notified Microsoft about them when I found them, so they may have been taken down already. But it’s the internet so realistically they’re still up somewhere.

You can also find the Windows Research Kernel, which is slightly sanitized and leaves out NTFS, HAL, PnP, and power management, but is slightly newer coming from the win 2k3 era.

Windows 2000 up through early release candidates also could run on Alphas, NT4 could run on even more things.

People at betaarchive. managed to compile working NT out of the leaked code, and some dude even build working NT/2000 hybrid out of those sources with some wine/ReactOS thrown in (OpenNT 4.5).

My question is: has anyone ever tried to actually compile the source and create their own working "unofficial build" of Windows?

Or is this not feasible due to factors that we non-programmers wouldn't understand?

My understanding is that the leaks were not complete source code. The leaks came from a third party company who was given a significant chunk (but not all) of the Windows source for development reasons (possibly driver development?). Can't compile partial code without weird hackery

yes, OpenNT. https://github.com/Paolo-Maffei/OpenNT

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