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> What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful.

The Windows NT4 source code leaked a while ago and can be found all over the internet. Of course that doesn't really help ReactOS because they officially can't use it, but that's probably the closest we will get to MS open sourcing Windows.

Windows 95 is a kludge by today's standards and it's been the little brother of the more complete Win32 implementation in the NT line. As a result, it is missing a ton of things that are essential parts of modern Windows. I don't see any value in that.

Arguably, the kludge is supporting Win32 on an NT kernel. The win32 layer on top of NT is a mess of backwards compatibility hacks with more modern NT and NTFS features hammered in. The native NT layer is much better but officially it's unstable.

Compared to that, Windows 9x was less kludge and more a straightforward implementation of Win32, though of course lacking modern features.

I'm not sure it's "pretty clear"? See the entire thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343007