[rwmj]

Windows source code is fairly widely available, as in government agencies, universities and others already have access. I'm sure this means anyone motivated enough could get it if they really wanted to. Of course even looking at it is problematic if you want to work on open source operating systems later, so I'm not sure why you'd voluntarily choose to do this.

[fluoridation]

It can be useful even if you're not directly incorporating it into your code. For example you might want stronger guarantees than the API documentation offers (e.g. "this function will only ever return values between this and that in this particular version of Windows"), and being able to read the code to check if your assumptions are valid is very useful. I've worked in function hooking before and ReactOS has been a very useful resource on occasion.

[easton]

When public documentation for the Hyper-V APIs sucks the way that it does, I'd be willing to risk not being able to write a operating system later if I could figure out a side project now ;)

[bpye]

Full disclosure, I work on Hyper-V. Are you thinking of these docs - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/hypervis... - or something else?

[easton]

I'm thinking of the HCS docs (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/hcs/over...). There's very poor documentation of the different types of VMs/Containers you can launch and how to launch them, I'm not sure how much of this is intentional or due to the newer container APIs being too new, but it's super frustrating when you're trying to understand how WSL2 or Windows Sandbox work (or honestly, how to use Windows containers without Docker).