Perhaps not if you plan of contributing code to any open source OS. Practices like this can leave projects exposed to intellectual property violations.
This is why reverse engineering usually requires more people, each who isn't privy to the previous persons source material.
I see somebody mirrored it already.
Unfortunately the average kid is likely not going to discover such things on the Internet, and even those who pirate tend to be more interested in far less educational content... I think it's somewhat sad that, despite the various file-sharing/peer-to-peer systems that have appeared making it easier than ever to share lots of content, and build something akin to a massive distributed library, the majority just use them for entertainment.
Really, we shouldn't encourage kids to waste their time on operating systems whose developers are hacker-hostile.
It hasn't been as common for a while, but I remember using a litestep ui in the win2k era... actually like the Windows 7 desktop/menu/toolbar interface a lot.
Beyond the UI on top of the underlying OS... I'd say that most software development is business processes, which can be handled in pretty much any operating system and higher level language on modern hardware/software that costs a lot less than the time used to develop said software. Yes, performance matters. Yes, there is a need for open platforms. However, good enough gets the job done most of the time.
I mention this as someone who really doesn't want to deal with the underlying hardware any more than I need to. I have no interest in writing or debugging drivers or system libraries. I do like writing useful, and sometimes not so useful things on top of other tools. If I can do that in node.js, c#, go or other languages that makes me happy. It also makes me frustrated when I need to do something in Windows that's far easier in Linux.
That's a bit harsh. The point of OS is to provide a computational platform for higher level computational stuff like arts and science. It would be a dark world if everyone just tinkered with OS kernels (while it sure is nice some people do).
(Ask an irrelevant question, get an irrelevant answer.)
Oh my. Aaaaand, mirrored. There's also this, which seems about the same level of should-this-actually-be-publicly-available: https://github.com/njdragonfly/WinNT4
(I was more surprised that this source dump doesn't seem to line up with the "Windows 2000" source leak that can be found if you look hard enough. Very peculiar.)
What's the story behind this? Did Microsoft willingly open source parts of its Windows kernel?
If you read that code and then contribute to an open source project (or even your own) and Microsoft finds out and tags you as foe, you'll be in a very bad position.
I work as a Windows device driver developer, and sometimes I need to reverse engineer some of the internals, and the source code from WRK is easily available on the internet : (http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R...). These are sources from 2005-2006 timeframe, but they are tremendously helpful when debugging. If you compare the disassembled version of an exported function from the Win 8.1 ntoskrnl, in most cases it's almost identical to the sources in those links. Of course, there are a few parts of the system which suffered changes, but nonetheless, it can still be very useful.
I would also recommend it for studying operating systems, but obviously, along side something else. Let's say after starting with XV6, or Pintos, Minix, then moving on to NetBSD, Linux, only after that having a look under the hood of Windows, to see a slightly different approach.
There is also the 'Windows Internals' book, but I never found it too useful. Describing concepts without any source code, and without a view to the implementation is not very helpful for me.
But I completely agree with you, personally, I would never use Windows if I wanted to play with it, I only use linux and bsd at home.