Windows XP source code has leaked
gizmodo.com.au
gizmodo.com.au
First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
Second, it was lightweight (in relative terms) in terms of UX and, somewhat consequently, engineering. With Windows Vista (but in particular, Windows 8), MS started to add complexity on every layer.
Nowadays, I'm really afraid to update Windows. I don't know what new services and programs are going to be added. I don't know if the tweaks still work. I don't know if I'm imposed some new behavior. I don't know where certain settings (even entire setting domains) are going to be located, and how they're going to be named.
In a way, Windows XP is the Windows equivalent of the Linux XFCE/LXDE desktop environments.
Win 2000 was amazing when it was released. Games (albeit not DOS ones) worked well, it was stable and really your only other options were worse (Mac OS 9 was less stable than Win 98, ME was a dumpster fire, Linux wasn't quite ready for the desktop and BeOS was awesome but barely supported).
Then when XP was released, it had twice the minimum and recommended hardware spec than 2000, it had those stupid skins and it didn't offer anything functionally more beneficial over 2000 (aside faster boot time if you had hundreds of fonts installed).
Granted XP got better with SP2 or SP3, but it definitely wasn't the first solid nor even lightweight when it was originally released.
What I remember from XP is that it took until SP2 before all the problems were worked out, and SP3 actually introduced more annoyances in the name of security. I also think the default theme and general visual style of the XP is downright terrible and completely unworthy of a large professional company like Microsoft. The very first thing I always did was to switch back to the classic UI for everything (theme, start menu, all control panels, etc).
I don't care for any of the 'modern' Windows versions. They work, behind the scenes the technology has improved, but I they still annoy me in many ways, and the UI is IMO the worst it has ever been in the history of Windows. It looks cleaner but behind the veneer its just a giant heap of historical accidents piled on over the years, with no consistent direction of vision to be found. I get no joy using it, but I guess if you are used to working in Windows the OS is perfectly fine for what it does.
Of course every Windows OS eventually gets stable and fast on current hardware, at which point everyone starts praying that they'll get to use it forever and they'll never have to deal with a new major release again.
- The classic theme was just a few clicks away
- Of all the problems with XP, I would not even list the "easily changed default theme" in the top.... 100 or so. I would not expect to see such sentiment on HN, of all places.
That is the perfect description. It’s one of the ugliest UIs I’ve ever experienced.
A decent number of not-ancient floss software supports it as well. Not so with 2k. Add thousands of security patches and firewall, and the choice is clear.
There wasn't much added to Windows XP over 2000 in the original release of XP (service pack 3 was released 6 years (!!!) after XP was originally launched. So it's not really fair comparing XP SP3 to Win 2k). I remember this era in computing vividly and it took a few service packs before XP really came into it's own. However you still paid the price running XP because it demanded double the hardware requirements to run when compared with Windows 2000. So sure, you could disable themes in XP but for many people sticking with Windows 2000 was more appealing because you had more preferable defaults out of the box plus less bloat / hardware overhead too.
I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited.
But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense.
It's a shame.
also see how software has stabilised over the years, both as a product and as a marketplace. there are now clearly defined best in class software that will take years to be disrupted.
but one of the major aspects against computer software has come from mobile. lots of development time has gone to browsers and mobile than desktop.
That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
The only reason I upgraded from Windows 2000 was that Microsoft was extremely reluctant to back-port USB- or WiFi-fixes and support, effectively forcing you to upgrade to XP if you wanted to fully use your modern hardware.
For that reason alone, XP always left a sour taste in my mouth.
I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened.
Should retry it in a VM sometime. :)
Windows 2000 was the last version of the NT branch where Dave Cutler was in charge. He's a legend for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2GV_bCfnCw
Computer History Museum long form interviews:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss
You can see why they didn't want to/couldn't backport USB drivers.
I used Windows 3.1 for years and I never had to reinstall it for stability reasons. At some point I also switched to XP and after 2 years it wouldn't boot anymore because of a blue screen appearing before the graphical interface would show up. That made the decision easy for me to use Linux exclusively - which I had on dual boot already for a considerable time.
To me Windows 95-XP were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times. Or for instance on Windows 95 sometimes the system would only boot if I opened and closed the (empty) CD tray.
At work I sometimes used Vista and 10, I think they are okay but macOS and Linux are far more fun.
However, I've briefly used NT4 as my "development box" (Delphi addict for a while, though in my defense, I was like 15 at the time) for 6-12 months, that was as stable as anything you could get. But it had the same problems as Linux: it was very specific as to what hardware it supports. The same "soft modems" (called "winmodems" at the time) were equally unsupported in NT4 just like in Linux, so you had to get yourself external hardware modems which were like 5-10x the cost (whatever came out of US Robotics?).
So since I was more into the hacker mindset, I moved into GNU/Linux world and never looked back.
But I did grow an appreciation for MS engineering: they can develop quality software, and did it even in 96, but their consumer OSes strive for unparalleled compatibility and allow anybody (literally anybody) to write system level code that runs on the kernel ring level due to that.
A couple years down the line, I've even seen an article how many workarounds they had to introduce into '95 to allow old software employing their own extended/expanded memory management tricks to continue to function (think stuff like DOS games, WordPerfect...).
For all the fun we make of it, Windows 95 was a marvel of engineering when you consider the constraints and requirements. Just oppose that to the new web app approach to software engineering: breaking backwards compatibility is such a common theme that nobody bats an eyelid.
However, I always wonder what makes your experience so different than mine.
For me I can simple replace what you said and it will still be valid:
To me Linux were really frustrating to use since random parts of the system (CD-ROM, Word, Games...) would stop working at random times.
(well the part about the CD tray never happened to me with any OS).
I really like the customizability of Linux and such, but in the end, Windows 2000, XP, and 10 just works 99% of the time. At least for me who I consider an advanced user.
Of course there are things I don't like, like telemetry, but the pros vs the cons, at least for me, make me always return to Windows.
I have also worked with macs and for 4 years my wife had a MacBook. Not only do I find the prices crazy expensive, compared with ThinkPads, but I never found anything that was better in OSX than in Windows.
Again, I can use macOS if needed be, and I find it just fine. But I prefer Win/ThinkPad.
Of course this is my own opinion.
But now things are of course a bit different, especially when choosing well supported hardware. On the other hand driver support tends to be more stable and long-term oriented on Linux since they tend to be maintained centrally in the Linux kernel. I agree that macOS is a bit mediocre in some sense, but somehow it unites the worlds of Linux and Windows.
All of the things people are complaining about here, like Microsoft becoming the de facto admin of of their Desktop Windows 10 products, are direct results of a period they manufactured.
All anyone who waxes nostalgic should do to test is install anything earlier than 10 on an internet facing computer and then wait. It's terrifying how fast they get compromised.
Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
As this leak is only XP SP1, it will be missing a lot of the bugfixes and upgrades that XP added by SP3 (and beyond).
with 1+ year -> with 1+ year of bug fixes
giving bugs -> fixing bugs
The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others).
The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot.
Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.
Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense.
But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.
Even then my use of Windows was low. I now have no need for it at all. From what I've heard Windows 10 is not in the same class.
> did not expect proprietary operating
> systems to be actively working against you.
Things were still overridable, but XP started the trend where the end user was not an allmighty sysadmin responsible for its own deeds good or wrong, but a consumer that should follow the vision of Microsoft and not touch the holy internals.
I can partially defend microsoft here. Everybody and their dog was messing around in the registry, was installing all kinds of system-breaking software, etc... But it also signifies a point where Microsoft realised it got powerfull enough to ignore the wishes of its own clients.
The analogy would hold if, dunno, buying some DRM Music also made you relinquish the ownership of your speakers to the vendor. It’s not quite as bad.
DRM is, for example, a way to kill the second hand market or lending. I can sell my table without approval from its manufacturer, or drag it to my neighbours for a day. I can't sell my songs.
In the same spirit, if I as a computer enthousiast want to upgrade my computer hardware or reinstall windows, I should not depend on microsoft's goodwill.
Windows Vista and onwards, MS, while claiming it was for technical and stability reasons, nixed a lot of features that were annoying to movie studios, basically they changed how driver stack worked in a way to make DRM easier and make harder to pirate movies.
But as consequence of that, a lot of cool stuff outright stopped working:
* Some interesting video modes
* Some obscure ways to output data
* And the one that annoyed me the most: Soundcards became useless.
Before that, Soundcards could do a LOT, they could have their own processor and do a lot of fancy stuff, most famously they could do "3D Audio", and it was super cool, Thief for example is a game that uses it well, it would use its own processor to do same thing GPUs do for graphics, and do it for audio, it would even raytrace sound (ie: suppose a character is on the other side of the wall, but there is a door on that wall, the card would calculate the sound of that character footsteps reflecting on the walls and reach you, then if you were using headphone or 4+ speakers it would make you hear the sound coming from the reflections, thus a person with good hearing could deduce where an enemy was, on the other side of a wall).
That stunt basically killed off the soundcard market, people then were making cooler and cooler cards, after that the cards became little more than just output ports soldered on a tiny board.
Sound Cards pre-vista: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Cr...
Sound Cards post-vista: https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_768672-MLB41729093507_052...
I'll just add—forced upgrades to Win10. Still hard to believe how much (some divisions of) MS despises its own customers. I call them the "Balmer camp" as a shorthand.
Despite parts of MS turning over a new leaf, the sociopath wing persist.
What a WARPed perspective. (hehe)
It's great that this was stolen and distributed? There's nothing great about that. This source was not lost and has essentially zero risk of being lost. It would have been held for all time immemorial within the vault of its owner.
> Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached.
Sorry, but that honor must certainly go to Linux? The OS itself perhaps doesn't have usability, but it has flexibility and everything in modern life depends on it. Every single person in the world, everyone, today depends somehow on Linux.
I'm not poo-pooing XP in anyway -- it was and is a great OS. Both for its time and still today. But I think it is far in Linux' shadow.
Much more fun is writing your own.
I tend to disagree. In my opinion it is the worst OS ever created and the reason it's popular has nothing to do with quality.
Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.
[German pro basketball team relegated to lower division due to Windows update | Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/germa...)
> "But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."
> After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.
> But then Chemnitz formally protested, saying that because Paderborn had delayed the start time of the match by 25 minutes (instead of the 15-minute maximum as allowed under the German basketball rules), they should be penalized. As a result, Paderborn lost another point (Google Translate) in the standings, according to a Basketball Budesliga press release, which meant that it would certainly be relegated to the "ProB" league of German pro basketball.
Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downloading that toolbar, installing that gizmo, disabling security settings".
People smugly complain about this, in many cases from their Linux box (= technical users on a system with a 1% desktop market share => smaller target and better human protection) or MacOS box (= slightly more technical users than the average Windows user, on a system with a 5%-10% desktop market share).
Windows 10X will probably have some more goodies.
Forcing people to update was probably the only way to stop that.
I'm also not a fan, I got burned at least once by a Windows 10 computer restarting in the middle of the night when I had programs running on it, but I guess it's one of these things that's good for 99%, the 1% is just overrepresented here.
The Edge update comes to mind that had reset the browser preference presumably to be able to push edge again.
"Its easy to install arch, all you have to do is run these 10 arcane commands"
With some linux distros is definitely feels like it is hostile to entry-level users. Which is probably by design, but I'm just saying that Windows isn't the only OS where you have to do a bunch of weird hostile setup stuff when you first install it
macOS ... Is special. Some of the most notable changes in the last few years have been to try to restrict what an app can do.
Both the UI lag and general performance in macOS is just a sad story.
My windows machine runs 24/7 for months without needing a restart. I am forced to restart macOS weekly, usually because of system issues.
One can love open-source and still be against license violations. What a warped world view.
Important source code acquired and leaked by a script kiddie who has zero clue how valuable it is. Probably uploading and posting it to some small forum, where everybody else has even less clue.
Then it can take years until an actually knowledgeable person stumbles upon it and makes it known to the world.
It seems that the list of files doesn't include anything that appears new (there were reports about the older sources leaked before and the list matches these), but includes the high troll insanity material about prominent "control" via "vaccinating the world".
Conspiracy videos about Bill Gates 35 GB
Just to put it in perspective... something the Gizmodo reporter miserably failed to do
I did open a couple readmes, and the poster didn't appear that well-versed with tech, despite meaning well. It's an amateur job, but those tend to do the bulk of the work.
nt5src.7z
windows_research_kernel/Windows Kernel Source Code like.7z
windows_research_kernel/wrktools.7z
There is a lot of filler, though. I assume the videos are trying to convey some point, but I'm not sure I care.
I'm very curious to see more come out as the code is picked apart piece by piece, and whether or not it'll confirm my suspicions. I'm also very interested in that Xbox folder, with any luck it'll be time to dust off my old OG Xbox and do some hacking!
https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel that site has quite a bit of info, with ongoing reverse-engineering and clean-room reimplementation projects (reactos, xquemu)
I'm not sure if it's wise to post the link as it may encourage others to download it and might be against the ToS on hackernews.
However, the commenter might have just posted the magnet link, which is more to the point, and unlikely to disappear (torrent 2.0 notwithstanding), unlike some third-party website (which could also turn out to be an infection vector). It also shortens the trust chain.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3d8b16242b56a3aafb8da7b5fc83ef993ebcf35b&dn=Microsoft%20leaked%20source%20code%20archive_2020-09-24&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce
Not really. It violates the major principle of clean room reverse engineering. That's why Wine developers are strictly avoiding such kind of situations. It can taint the result with legal problems.
Probably higher -- XP is still popular in China and supported by third party companies there.
https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
Most state-owned banks too, popular browsers are all duel-engine. There's little to no incentive to change what's working, and customers experiences don't really matter.
Also, as I've mentioned ages ago, a few years back I visited a factory with a very expensive 5-axis industrial milling machine (I was told its value was about $300k). I was very surprised to see that it was still running Windows 2000—and that's something I'd definitely notice immediately, as W2K has always been my favorite Windows version.
When I asked the engineer in charge if they were going to upgrade Windows 2000 to a later version, he said without any hesitation whatsoever that they definitely would not. Moreover, without further prompting, he said that the machine had a design life of 25 years which meant that it would be in operation until at least 2025 if not longer.
He added that I wasn't the first to ask this question and went on to say that upgrading was irrelevant as W2K was still fully fit for purpose.
What is even more surprising is what I saw at a brand new industrial plant that I visited even more recently. This time the company was a large international operation with various plants across the world that is involved in the manufacture and assembly of heavy industrial equipment and parts. One of the reasons I was visiting the factory was that the plant was brand new, in fact tooling setups for some of its operations still had to be fully commissioned.
What I saw there were literally dozens of PCs still running Windows XP! The PCs were integral to the company's factory automation in that they controlled various industrial equipment and processes most of which were all brand new (after all, it was a new plant).
Here too, I quizzed the engineer in charge of showing me around about the use of the now very-dated XP on the company's PC. His reply was that by using XP in the operation of the new plant would ensure that this plant would still be identical with their other plants across the world and that this was strategically very important for many reasons, especially so at times of maintenance and breakdowns (as they could call on common practices and procedures already in use across all of their plants worldwide).
He added that whilst they still had considerable stocks of normal commercial PCs that were hardware compatible with XP, they nevertheless were aware of the potential that at some future point they might run out of 'normal' XP machines. To solve this potential XP/hardware obsolescence problem, they had an easy long-term solution, which is to use mobos that are normally used for industrial control processes (embedded systems, etc.) and there is no shortage of ones that are compatible with XP (in fact I've catalogs that have hundred of similar boards, so many in fact that it's a pain to differentiate or select the best board for one's application). Incidentally, many IT people have never seen these boards due to their niche nature. Even I think it strange that so many types of x86/64 PWAs exist as I can think of better or more appropriate processors for embedded systems, TI, Motorola and ARM chips for instance).
If anyone thinks old Windows technology is actually obsolete then let them think and think again. It's only naive or disinterested Windows users who are cajoled or coerced by Microsoft into upgrading Windows and those forced by default to do so when they buy new PC hardware who actually concern themselves Windows upgrades.
Of course it's only we IT professionals who are permanently preoccupied with OS upgrades and worry about such matters—not to mention the fact that we live in a perennial state upgrade-itis and always have security matters/patches permanently ingrained in our minds. The fact that we think this way lulls us into believing that most PC and smartphone users similarly think this way but in fact nothing is further from the truth. Moreover it's only a very small percentage of 'normal' PC users who ever bother to give their OS a second thought and that's only when it's a means to an end. Others including many industrial users are much more pragmatic and sanguine about upgrading and only do so when they absolutely must—and never at Microsoft's whim or wish.
Like it or not, expect to see ancient museum-piece versions of MS Windows still in use for decades to come.
Also, it's not just (allegedly) all of XP source that's been leaked:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-windows-...
It's also Windows Server 2003, MS DOS 3.30, MS DOS 6.0, Windows 2000, Windows CE 3, Windows CE 4, Windows CE 5, Windows Embedded 7, Windows Embedded CE, Windows NT 3.5, and Windows NT 4!
That's a huge amount of stuff to analyse.
But if you cannot guarantee the correspondence between source and binary releases, such a review only helps a little. Reproducible build is crucial for auditability.
I can confirm that back in the Windows 2000 days, MS let a major global bank have access to the Windows 2000 source code to aid them in coding some low level bespoke software.
Back then, if you were a gold customer, you could pretty much get anything out of MS under an NDA.
I hate it. It was so easy in DOS era - same source, same binary file, easy peasy.
There's a possibility the leaked files are tampered from the original code anyway, i.e. backdoors were removed before being initially leaked. Rationale being that Microsoft / government wanted to control the situation long-term by letting something tampered be what leaks out underground instead of the 100% full thing.
Torrent poster also discusses that possibility: https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsxp/comments/iz46du/the_windo...
Nonetheless, it's interesting if anything plausible is found.
Remember, almost everything in the Snowden disclosures was known before snowden - but generally dismissed as “conspiracy theories”.
None if it was proved, until it was.
Russia and China aren’t buying any of this, and are fabricating their own chips. 5-Eyes are likely in on the thing so no reason for them to set up their own fab facilities.
But setting up your own software ecosystem is much easier (especially given Linux / BSD), even though it’s still expensive - so intelligence agencies would rather not give countries incentive to do so just because there’s a back door.
Besides, probably the quality was still low enough that you didn't need this, there were plenty of bugs that would grant a big organisation access.
And the archive when it gets pruned: https://archive.is/eg9nw
I can't see a copyright issue if new drivers were brand new code. The trouble's always been MS has deliberately denied providing new drivers for newer hardware as deliberate means of obsoleting its older versions.
Using older versions of Windows (such as Win 7) on new hardware is a highly desirable idea for those of us who are mightily pissed off that Microsoft has essentially converted is Windows platform from an operating system to a spyware and advertising platform. New drivers would solve the problem.
"buildx /z"
"postbuild" should make an iso
Projects on reverse-engineering and reimplementing proprietary technologies are the most vulnerable. A decade ago, ReactOS's development was suspended for years until the codebase has been reviewed.
[0] It's not illegal. If you can absolutely guarantee your work is not a derivative work based on the leaked source, but just a reimplementation, it's fine to proceed (the clean-room approach is not always needed, it simply offers the strongest legal guarantee). But for a big project with numerous contributors, the risk is high.
That's why they have policies to not look at any leak, and even with this ReactOS and Wine already had their share of controversies in the past.
It seems like it would just go undetected.
With the risk of copyright infringement you want to be sure that you're taking active measures to defend your position in case you're facing legal charges.
In short, this leak likely won’t affect any project that is seriously trying to reimplement substantial parts of Windows, if they care at all for US law.
There should be some law about interoperability.
Or has this code been out there for a while?
According to the torrent creator's reddit post "[a]pparently the file had been passed around privately for years among hackers".
> Can you explain what a source code is to me like I’m five?
Because some readers might not know what is the source code. Or they might have a vague idea but they might not understand what it means for the source code to be released.
> I don’t think the concept of source code is inaccessible to laymen.
I don’t think the article claims that. On the contrary; how I see it, the article explains the concept.
A further development of the analogy would be one could try to replicate the cake mix by reading the list of ingredients and using their knowledge of baking and trial an error to replicate it as closely as possible vs getting their hands on the exact formula used by the maker of the cake mix.
I'm not sure you can get a client that would distribute nothing. You also have to make sure you don't advertise others in the swarm or any info.
Researchers have done it, not sure how technically.
Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice - http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
The internet and operating systems have had an evil feedback loop. To quote from The Outer Limits, 1963: "We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set."
Even supposedly free browsers like Firefox are getting in on the act, pestering the user with updates, and make it difficult to turn off. My dad complains about this constantly.
More and more, we see external agents dictating policy.
I don't think even Richard Stallman originally predicted the true nightmare that computing would be become.
Also, what would be the legality a group of people "maintaining" this code? (developing security patches, etc)
For the second part: that's probably legally impossible world wide due to trade secret protection agreements.
People did this for the last version of opera that still used its own engine.
Unless you set your seeding limits to 0kb. You take a hit in speed/availability (as more peers will likely not do business with you), but you also don't distribute anything.
Long story short, there are two major ways in how copyright violations are approached. Either the other party starts a civil suit in court and tries to claim damages (much like if you would damage someone else's property); or state law considers this a prosecutable felony or crime, in which case you look at punishments such as fines or prison time. Moreover, you may run the risk of being liable to both scenario's.
In the United States, criminal copyright law is a thing:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_copyright_law_in_the_...
However, it does state:
> Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringer acted "for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain." 17 U.S.C. § 506(a).[9] To establish criminal liability, the prosecutor must first show the basic elements of copyright infringement: ownership of a valid copyright, and the violation of one or more of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. The government must then establish that defendant willfully infringed or, in other words, possessed the necessary mens rea. Misdemeanor infringement has a very low threshold in terms of number of copies and the value of the infringed works.
> An individual may be liable if the infringement was committed: (B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or (C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution. 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)(1).
> Without establishing the threshold value, legitimate infringement, or the requisite state of mind, there can be no criminal liability. If the defendant can show they had a legitimate copy or use – such as through the first-sale doctrine – then the burden of proof falls on the government.[9]
Directly using the code would imply liability to copyright infringement. When you want to compete with the product of a competitor, that's something you want to avoid. A classic tactic to avoid this is "clean room design":
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
> Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.
ReactOS is a contested example of "clean room design" for copying elements from Windows:
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_resea... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341933
> "I think it's a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities under an agreement that was obviously violated by some, as the code has been uploaded to numerous places, some of it on GitHub," Rietschin wrote. "I glanced at the ReactOS code tree, and in my opinion, there is absolutely no way on Earth this was written from a clean sheet only from the available public documentation." He says that "internal data structures and internal functions, not exported anywhere and not part of the public symbols, have the exact same names as they appear in the Research Kernel."
The issue with this code leak is that any engineer looking at this risks being considered "burned" if they are ever asked to implement similar features in a comparable product and rely on their knowledge. I wouldn't touch it with a 30 feet pole.
I have a MacBook Pro 2007 multi-booting XP, 7, Ubuntu, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11. Surprisingly, XP is the OS I use most frequently on that laptop, by choice.
I got some old HP laptops running XP for the homestay family kids, and have been playing network games and chatting with Escargot MSN.
Windows XP still supports 16 bit DOS games. If the Luna theme seems childish, it's even more appropriate for young people using computers for the first time. Buttons have icons, which is easier when you're 6 and can't read quickly.
I hope this source code can allow me to boot XP natively on my main laptop, so I don't have to carry around another computer just for compatibility.
In my experience, Windows XP runs fine on relatively modern hardware. The biggest offender is generally storage drivers (AHCI). You can download a driver and re-pack the installer with it.
Note that I haven't tried this in a long time, it might not be practical anymore. But with today's HW-assisted virtualization, you could just boot it in qemu or any other accelerated virtual machine, and you couldn't tell the difference.
How modern? And what hardware models? Was the newer hardware Win 7 compatible or later?
I wish you'd be more specific and tell us how as it's never worked for me even after mucking about with different PC hardware and various different AHCI and other drivers.
- Intel Core 2 Quad and Xeon E5472, DDR2. Old-ish (the xeon came out in 2010), but I used that system as my main until 2018 -- though with Linux.
- Samsung N220 (or quite similar) netbook. That thing originally came out with Win7 starter, and was a slog with it.
A cursory search ("Ryzen XP") gives plenty of results: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/installing-windows-xp-on-a... https://community.hwbot.org/topic/189776-xp-works-on-ryzen/
Though by now ReactOS might be better supported, especially on modern HW.
Even if you paid anything for such an old product, your money wouldn't be going to MS anyway. Not sure what difference it makes, paying for an abandoned product.
Laws which make no sense and have no value to society should be ignored. If software is abandoned, it should be distributed freely.
"Here’s where the metaphor really breaks down but stay with me: imagine if you wanted to break into a house but you didn’t know how. If you knew they had to open their windows when they baked, that would help you sneak in."
well, ok. let's do this.
The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.
Correct, but does anyone really care? Many of us will have died from old age long before ReactOS actually produces a UI without crashing! It seems to me that even if the team used ideas from XP, by the time they implemented them and tried to disguise the fact, that it would be so old and irrelevant no would care. Probably not even Microsoft.
I would love ReactOS to succeed but the only version that I've managed to get working on my various test machines is about four years old. All the newer versions, and like all those before my one and only working version, simply crash.
If they claim they just reverse engineered the code, they're in an equal amount of trouble. Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, unless you manage to do it in a very specific way which should still results in different code than what Microsoft wrote.
The more source code leaks, the harder it becomes to claim plausible deniability. Ethically, I think that's wrong and should be fixed, but the copyright and software protection law is against compatibility projects like these when it comes to legislation.
Not that I care much nowadays, as XP's code release is unlikely to affect me in any practical sense other than for just curiosity to see what goes on beneath its surface.
Having experience with almost all Windows releases from the grotty, horrible Windows 1.0 of 1985 to the current Win 10, I've no doubt whatsoever the best and most practical version of the OS for me was Windows 2000, and from the numerous post I've read here many of you agree with me. (Incidentally, to be more precise, Win 3.1 for Workgroups was the first version I used in any practical sense as I found that Win 1.0, 2.0 and even 3.0 were essentially useless.)
My second choice is Win XP and it's still installed on one of my older working machines. In some ways, my next choice would likely be NT4, I had a lot of experience with it but once you got it working, which wasn't always easy, it was reasonably solid and straightforward to use. Of course, its major downfall was both the lack of drivers and not having any effective plug and play infrastructure (hence installing it was often messy and time consuming).
That said, I doubt this XP source code leak will be a unique event. I fully expect that we will see a great deal more source code becoming available from proprietary Windows-like software in the not-too-distant future—even if these 'leaks' do not originate from within the software companies in question (as all that will be needed is access to the compiled code).
There is little doubt that soon we will see competent deep-leaning AI disassemblers become available that will be able to learn how to disassemble large programs such as Windows with ease whilst simultaneously attributing its disassembled code with meaningful and intelligible code comments and descriptions. Moreover, I see little way that software manufacturers will be able to do to stop this from happening.
(I'd however add a caveat to the above, which is that whilst AI disassemblers will likely be able to eventually disassemble most existing compiled code that's been developed for past and present-day processors—from say the earliest 4004, 8085, 8051 and upwards to present-day ones as well as those likely to be developed in the immediate foreseeable future—this may not always remain the case, as it's possible that neither critical parts of compiled code nor newer specialized processor instruction sets may be available once manufacturers become aware of the threat.)
Furthermore, I'd wager it's likely that eventually AI disassemblers will actually learn on code such as this leaked Win XP. After all, what better sample would be available to a third-party AI developer or researcher to train his or her AI on than the source of the once-famous XP? None I suspect! Moreover, I'd add that I would be very surprised if companies of the likes of Microsoft and Google aren't already training their own AI on disassembling their own code. (After all, they've 'brilliant' examples to hand and a vested interest in seeing how capable AI is at the task of code disassembly—and moreover they need to know how much lead time they have before this new technology poses a serious threat to their existing products).
That said, with about a half century's worth of existing software compiled from many trillions of lines of code that will be available come the time AI is ready to examine and disassemble it, the snoopers among us will still have great scope! Frankly, I reckon the large-scale application of AI to code disassembly would be a truly great thing: just think of all the bugs and shitty bloated code we'll find. Moreover, exposing source code would put manufacturers on notice to improve their products—as not only would their multitudes of bugs and crappy code be exposed but also they wouldn’t be able to hide dirty tricks and corrupt practices as Volkswagen did with its engine emission technology.
AI disassemblers may even force many manufacturers to adopt the open-source model for their software development.
I've little doubt that over the long term code disassembly by AI will change the current paradigm of software development forever. Unlike its current undisciplined laissez faire approach to product development that encourages sloppy code full of bugs, software development will have to adapt to become a much more professional and rigorous engineering profession such as chemical or civil engineering both of which adhere to much stricter rules and disciplines—and I reckon that will be a good thing.
A more rigorous approach to software development is something I've advocated for many years—as I class myself a victim of poor software having lost thousands of hours of my valuable time—right, thousands of hours out of my life that would have otherwise been used to better purpose—resolving problems caused by poor, buggy and dysfunctional software—of which the majority thereof would never have occurred had standards comparable to those of other engineering professions been applied to software development. Given AI technology is of itself a product of software, and that it inevitably will be turned upon its own means of creation, seems to me to be poetic justice.
In the interim, I eagerly await revelations and 'meaty' pronouncements from eager XP code examiners.
This is something that the wine devs themselves shouldn't do for obvious reasons.
It won't have to be. As I've said elsewhere, eventually deep-learning AI disassemblers will do it for us complete with commented code!
(That's if anyone is still interested.)