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.
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.
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.
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".
It makes sense, I don't think MS cares about Windows anymore in the azure/O365 era.
OPs hypothesis isn't totally outlandish.
Too embedded to move off XP but they're going to install a home brew version of WinXP? Extremely doubtful.