Forget YouTube. Google "windows xp source code leaks" and one of the top hits is a six-year old GitHub repo.
Which sort of makes sense. I'm not sure technical trade secrets have ever played much of a role in Microsoft's success.
With or without source code, programmers have been digging at the internals of Microsoft OSes for fun and profit since the DOS days, and Microsoft has always seemed to recognize that developers and customers relying on the undocumented nuances of their products benefits them far more than understanding them benefits their competitors.
I imagine he's fine with it in terms of job satisfaction at the very least, as far as I can tell his areas of expertise are shell and related COM internals, and he clearly takes pride in the nuances of cleaning up other peoples' messes, and if there are two things that have remained constant in Windows programming over the past 30 years, it's COM and messes.
It literally took me less than five minutes to cobble together a build environment from thin air, cross-compile, and test:
1. Glance at the Makefile, notice that it's a single self-contained C file and that it builds on Open Watcom.
2. Google Open Watcom, download the latest Linux binary release from GitHub on my Windows PC because that's where I'm sitting but my plan is to run it on the Linux box across the room, currently headless.
2. Out of habit, I run "file" and "7z l" on what's apparently a self-extracting installer when it finishes downloading.
3. Realize it contains binaries for multiple platforms, including Windows, so I extract it.
4. Following the Makefile, set a WATCOM environment variable pointing to the extracted path and add its "binnt64" directory to my path.
5. Copy/paste the single compilation command from the Makefile into PowerShell. Cross-compiles without error.
7. Create an ISO image of the source directory containing the binary, mount it on the nearest DOS-alike (an 86Box instance running MS-DOS 6.22 on an emulated Pentium MMX IBM PC), ran the included test program. Tests pass.
It works pretty well for greenfield projects on .NET, so long as you can live without third-party libraries that don't support AOT.
Existing code bases can be a pain, though, especially applications that heavily rely on things like C++/CLI and COM Interop that basically need to be rewritten from scratch.
Which is not to say that it's intended to replace the traditional JIT runtime in applications where it isn't troublesome, because it's not.
A few years ago I had to use a pair of high-voltage to low-voltage differential SCSI converters to connect an external DEC TK50 tape drive to my PC, because while I had plenty of HD68-to-HD68 cables, and HD68-to-Centronics cables, and a wide variety of ISA and PCI SCSI HBAs (and probably a couple EISA and Micro Channel boards if I looked hard enough, and I seem to recall finding a VL bus SCSI HBA on a shelf at work a few years ago), the only PCIe SCSI HBAs I have are multichannel cards with VHDCI ports, and the only VHDCI cables I have are VHDCI-to-VHDCI and VHDCI-to-HD68.
I do this. All my FireWire 400-to-800, 400-to-400, 400-to-dinky little Sony 400, etc. cables were all in one box, the FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter was in the box with my Thunderbolt cables and adapters, and I still didn't find the FireWire 800-to-800 cable I needed to use Target Disk Mode on a friend's Mac a few months ago until a few weeks later when I was cleaning out my storage unit and found an unused FW800 cable in a box I guess I was saving on the off chance that I needed to return a 15-year-old LaCie RAID enclosure that was shucked about a decade ago off for warranty repairs.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
Yes, but for humans it creates friction. Seeing a captcha makes me think twice and thrice if I really want to visit that site so badly that I'll endure the suckage. LLMs don't care, for them the friction doesn't exist.
I tend to think of this a bit differently, and would say that C is a low-level language, independent of implementation architecture, because it provides a small set of primitives with relatively simple behavior.
Reason being, I don't see any fundamental difference between an x86 CPU that translates x86 instructions into simpler microinstructions for execution and a machine that translates, say, Haskell code into simpler microinstructions for execution, and I'd still consider Haskell a higher-level language than C.
No, but some are retrocomputing enthusiasts who might occasionally run vintage browsers on non-Y2K compliant systems. The cert in question has a "not before" date in 1998, and Netscape 4.51 hails from around same time.
Probably zero doing anything worth MitMing, though.
Which sort of makes sense. I'm not sure technical trade secrets have ever played much of a role in Microsoft's success.
With or without source code, programmers have been digging at the internals of Microsoft OSes for fun and profit since the DOS days, and Microsoft has always seemed to recognize that developers and customers relying on the undocumented nuances of their products benefits them far more than understanding them benefits their competitors.
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