[tombert]

This is cool, but I really wish they'd release the source for the original Notepad. No real reason other than "this software was really important to me when I was a kid".

As it stands, though, Calculator is not something I've particularly cared about in the Windows world; pretty much anyone here could write a simple calculator app in an afternoon.

Still, I am glad MS is slowly becoming more OSS-friendly; I doubt anyone installs Windows specifically for the calculator app, so as a result, why the hell not open-source it?

[ktjfi]

Part of the Windows 2000 source code leaked and it included Notepad. I don't think it's changed much since then as it's pretty much a wrapper around the Win32 widget with a few features like changing the font, printing, etc.

The only place where I found it where it is publicly "browseable" -> http://www.codeforge.com/article/148667

[_trampeltier]

It seems they updated a couple of things in Notepad (Unix eol, text size, ..) https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%20notepad&sort=byDate&...

[ocdtrekkie]

"Original" is the issue there. They're far more likely to open source a modern UWP app, written with current best practices in mind, rather than a 20 year old C app with untold terrors hiding in the codebase. If they ever rework Notepad into a UWP app, I suspect that would be open sourced, as I expect many newer Windows components to be.

[temac]

IIRC Notepad source code is in a Windows SDK. Probably an old one, but it only started to be actively maintained quite recently (and even then: only very lightly), so the source code you can get will likely cover most of its lifespan for now.

I'm not sure the source of notepad is that much interesting, though. I mean, yeah, nice to have out of curiosity, maybe, but I'm not sure I would get anything from looking at it. I'm even more interested by monstrosities like historical version of conhost, or of cmd, because it is both simultaneously horrendous and bizarrely not extremely buggy (probably was debugged by some kind of brute force effort, then... :p )

Although a version of the Notepad source under a free software licence would at least permit to strip it of the new ridiculous shits, like "Search with Bing" and maybe some spying features.

[tombert]

I have this kind of masochistic fantasy of rewriting Notepad directly in a modern language. No new features, an identical port in Scheme or something.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I feel like that would be trivial with a clean room reimplementation. There's just not that much functionality to clone.

[cr0sh]

For me (and for a lot of other people) what I wish they would release as open source is VB6.

There are a ton of good reasons why this is unlikely to ever happen, though (third-party licenses mainly).

There are a ton of VB6 applications out there running, and Microsoft so far has continued to keep the runtime around, but that won't always be the case.

When it is finally EOL'd, people aren't going to be happy at all about it...

[sixothree]

Accepting some pull requests on notepad would be nice....