Perhaps a better question to consider is what types of machines are still running it? I didn’t find any hard data to answer this question, however there are dedicated machines like MRIs that don’t have easy upgrade paths and still use the OS and there is an embedded version of XP that runs on point-of-sale, automated teller machines, set-top boxes, and other long-life hardware that are notorious for not being upgraded by their owners.įrom both the whitehat and blackhat side, source code is a boon for chasing down vulnerabilities. At the time of writing, statcount pegs Windows XP at a 0.82% market share which is still going to be a very large number of machines. The next thing that comes to mind are the security implications.
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Erin mentions in her article that just looking at the code is the danger zone for competitors.Įven if other software companies did look at the source code and implement their own improvements without crossing the legal line, how much is there still to gain? Surely companies with this kind of motivation would have reverse engineered the secret sauce of the long dead OS by now, right? Spy vs. Microsoft has a formidable legal machine that would surely go after misuse of the code from a leak like this. The thing is, it has now been more than six years since Microsoft dropped support for XP, does it really matter if the source code is made public? The Poison PillĪs Erin Pinheiro pointed out in her excellent article on the Nintendo IP leak earlier this year (perhaps the best Joe Kim artwork of the year on that one, by the way), legitimate developers can’t really make use of leaked code since it opens them up to potential litigation. The Verge says they have “verified the material as legitimate” and that the leak also includes Windows Server 2003 and some DOS and CE code as well. News comes overnight that the Windows XP source code has been leaked.
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