Given that one of the core principles the hacker culture was founded upon is "knowledge should be free", I think setting such an example is clearly in the spirit of encouraging such a culture.

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.

That benefit doesn't seem like enough to offset the fact that they'll be running an OS which is very difficult or impossible to actually modify for use. Any changes made would amount to a fork with one of the worst possible merge workflows; for beginners an open-source environment is much easier to start modifying, and for the more experienced it's much more productive to modify an environment that has a responsive upstream.

Really, we shouldn't encourage kids to waste their time on operating systems whose developers are hacker-hostile.

That assumes you can't do anything useful ON an operating system without changing the underlying system. I've never changed linux or osx either, but I find I can do a lot of useful things on them.

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 benefit doesn't seem like enough to offset the fact that they'll be running an OS which is very difficult or impossible to actually modify for use. "

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).

Are Snowden's files a stolen property of NSA?

The NSA is a federal government agency, and as such, its works are not subject to copyright. Snowden leaked only public-domain information.

(Ask an irrelevant question, get an irrelevant answer.)

And only until Microsoft turns a blind eye. Anyone remember what happened to the WP7 "ROM unlocking" guys? Microsoft bullied them with legal action, and then they announced some kind of "partnership" where the project they were doing for free before now cost $10...and it quickly disappeared.