Windows Source Code Leaked!

[IceDigger]

Story

What do you think the consequences of this are? More lethal viruses?

 

[Gallstaff]

I think it means many a windows clone will be sprining up in a few years

 

[antime]

If it's true, that code is poisonous. Noone who's ever looked at it can work on an operating system ever without fear of being sued out of existence.

 

[Curtis]

(Refering to Gallstaff)I doubt it.

Some stories I've seen suggest that the source is likely to be incomplete, unless it came from MS itself. Judging by Slashdot responses, most open source developers won't touch it with a bargepole, 40ft or otherwise.

As for viruses, maybe. So far the creators of such things have been sucessful without the source.

 

[Dud]

Can you link to a download page? Just kidding, don't tackle me mal.

 

[racketboy]

wow! yeah -- don't think too many people are stupid enough to try doing much with it

 

[mal]

Originally posted by mountaindud@Feb 13, 2004 @ 11:17 AM

Can you link to a download page? Just kidding, don't tackle me mal.

Didn't the windows source (or part of it) get leaked once before?

 

[antime]

That's the rumour. Anyway, a posted file list of the purported Windows 2000 source archive reveals that it's an old snapshot from 2001. It's also only about 650MB (CD-sized? Coincidence or just one of a set of backup CDs?) and seems to lack a lot of components from the "full" distribution. It's interesting to note that not only does the archive still contain the MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC directories from NT4, but there's already some support for ia64.

 

[it290]

I'm guessing this will probably lead to a lot of security problems and not much else. Although some underground developers will probably take the code and release their own versions of Windows for various purposes (stripped down mini-distros come to mind).

I wonder if a lot of NDA code has been leaked-- there's probably some proprietary hardware information buried within the source code for various drivers, if those were leaked.

 

[Alexvrb]

Last I heard it was "only" like 13.5 million lines of code leaked out of 30+ million lines. Christ, who would WANT to subject themselves to that kind of torture?

 

[it290]

Heh, yeah, I don't foresee any one person going through ALL the code- nor can I imagine many reasons why you would want to.

 

[AntiPasta]

The whole sourcecode is supposed to be 40GB so I've heard

 

[stack99]

:agree :agree I have heard that as well, the other thing you get from ms, is that win 2k was around 200,000,000 lines of code, and xp and 2k3 adds to that... I think 40g, might be if not right, damn near close. :agree

 

[antime]

According to a Usenix talk the total size was 50GB (see the slide titled "Source Code Control System (Windows 2000)") but I'm pretty sure that's the space required to do a full build, ie. object files and temporary files are included.

 

[it290]

I thought one of those slides said the size required for a total build was 80g. Yeah, most likely it isn't the whole thing. But, (as someone pointed out at slashdot), let's not forget that source code compresses extremely well.

 

[antime]

The size of the compressed archive is under 250MB, the uncompressed size is 650MB. Anyway, it seems like it's the real deal (note the "portions of").

 

[slinga]

What's with all the makefiles? These guys don't use visual studio

 

[ExCyber]

I'd laugh if they were cross-compiling from Xenix...

 

[antime]

Visual Studio's dependency system isn't so great, so several people at my workplace use GNU Make to run their compiles. Also, if you don't want to or can't use Visual Studio it's a good option (Emacs users, automated builds etc.). Microsoft's nmake is so crippled it's not a real option.

 

[gameboy900]

If they find out who actually leaked the code you can be that MS will make sure that the cops are not involved in punishing that person. If you know what I mean. Shit they got enough money to make whoever is responsible for this enjoy pain for many years to come.

Let's just hope our firewalls (YOU HAVE ONE RIGHT!?!) are strong enough against the onslaught of viruses.