Good ReactOS developers don’t have to guess anymore. They can use this code as a reference and build their own version better than hasty M$ Devs.
The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.
If they claim they just reverse engineered the code, they're in an equal amount of trouble. Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, unless you manage to do it in a very specific way which should still results in different code than what Microsoft wrote.
The more source code leaks, the harder it becomes to claim plausible deniability. Ethically, I think that's wrong and should be fixed, but the copyright and software protection law is against compatibility projects like these when it comes to legislation.
Correct, but does anyone really care? Many of us will have died from old age long before ReactOS actually produces a UI without crashing! It seems to me that even if the team used ideas from XP, by the time they implemented them and tried to disguise the fact, that it would be so old and irrelevant no would care. Probably not even Microsoft.
I would love ReactOS to succeed but the only version that I've managed to get working on my various test machines is about four years old. All the newer versions, and like all those before my one and only working version, simply crash.