[lekkeri]

Is there any chance that older versions of Windows will have their source code officially released?

They're already out there as source code leaks, but it would be nice to be able to view it legally and perhaps more completely, in a similar way to how we can view the .NET reference source.

I really enjoyed browsing the NT4 and 2000 leaks, it was fascinating to see how Windows works under the hood, and I was interested to see how well (or not) my understanding of the disassembly matched up with where it came from. It also helped massively with troubleshooting and understanding API surfaces, particularly the kernel side.

Could this ever happen, is there the political will internally to be even more open on the OS side?

[oblio]

I'm not from Microsoft, but I think they're probably working on stuff like that, it's just a monumental task at the start, since they've probably licensed many components from companies that probably aren't around anymore... so you'd have to chase current license holders, which can be super tricky.

Besides the fact that they have to scan the code, remove offensive bits, figure out if some code is still in use and it might have security vulnerabilities or could disclose things they don't want disclosed, etc.

I guess they're slowly open sourcing kind of stand alone components, to bank on nostalgia.

I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now all the Windows plumbing is open source (it's not a money maker for them, anyway), à la Darwin and MacOS, and they just keep the management layer proprietary: settings, shell, UI toolkit, etc.