There's been some side tables mention of this from some Microsoft staff.
Long story short: it's been discussed internally, as a gesture of good will, but they can't, due to intellectual property reasons. Further, there's no good incentive (other than ephemeral good will) for Microsoft to do so, even if they solved the IP problem.
Regardless, there are substantial source code leaks of Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003, if you know where to look.
I guess I have two thoughts that spring to mind regarding this;
A) why?
B) they can't. Because XP is not like some notepad app someone wrote. Rather it is a collection of software, a lot of it owned by not-microsoft and licensed to them. And that's before we talk about the security implications to existing systems still running XP.
Thirdly, what possible benefit could they get for doing this? I can see plenty of down-sides, including some very large potential economic and legal downsides. But I can't think of an upside.
Long story short: it's been discussed internally, as a gesture of good will, but they can't, due to intellectual property reasons. Further, there's no good incentive (other than ephemeral good will) for Microsoft to do so, even if they solved the IP problem.
Regardless, there are substantial source code leaks of Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003, if you know where to look.
A) why?
B) they can't. Because XP is not like some notepad app someone wrote. Rather it is a collection of software, a lot of it owned by not-microsoft and licensed to them. And that's before we talk about the security implications to existing systems still running XP.
Thirdly, what possible benefit could they get for doing this? I can see plenty of down-sides, including some very large potential economic and legal downsides. But I can't think of an upside.
And subsequent systems still using some of that code
Knowing that Github is owned by Microsoft, they probably are fine with it.
Why?