It lives! Windows Longhorn has been resurrected and is available for download. Microsoft unveiled Longhorn back in early 2002, as the operating system designed to succeed Windows XP. However, the 2002 Windows Longhorn and the January 31, 2007 Windows Vista are not one and the same operating system. I am sure that there are still some of you that recall August 27, 2004, a day when Microsoft announced a scale back and a reset of Longhorn in order to make the then planned 2006 deadline. If Microsoft had not changed course back in 2004, Windows Vista as we know it would have never booted on our desktops. Sure enough, it seems that a group of developers failed to see eye to eye with the Redmond Company on the divergent trajectory from Longhorn. As a result, they took it upon themselves to resurrect Windows Longhorn according to Microsoft's original vision of the operating system.

While Windows Vista no longer has the Windows File System (WinFS) feature and its core has been built starting from the Windows Server 2003 kernel, the Joejoe group have gone back to the pre-release Build 4074 of Longhorn and took it from there. "Longhorn Reloaded M1 Technical Refresh - The second public release of Longhorn Reloaded. The serial required is: TCP8W-T8PQJ-WWRRH-QH76C-99FBW. This technical refresh release can now be installed on a partitioned hard drive. You shouldn't have any problems while installing unlike the original Longhorn Reloaded M1 Release," reveals a message that accompanied the download. In fact, the two screenshots that you are able to see at the bottom come not from Windows Vista but from Windows Longhorn Reloaded M1.

Microsoft has so far failed to react to the project officially, but the Redmond Company did state that the end users license agreement for the beta build of Longhorn does not allow users to modify and redistribute the code. Meanwhile, the Joejoe group - under the leadership of Jemaho (JeanMarie Houvenaghel) - informed that the development process will move to the M2 milestone.

It makes me sad that Microsoft can't see the value of Open Source. If they simply let others work on their code, things like WinFS would be ready to deploy months ago. Instead, people have to reverse engineer them...