Microsoft Source Code Found On Internet

While researching for an upcoming article, I stumbled upon the source code for a number of applications that Microsoft aquired when they purchased Sysinternal. It seems that even the mighty Microsoft needs to bow to The Wayback Machine and forgotten files!

If you go to the Sysinternals website today, you will automatically be redirected to a page on the Microsoft website. But back before Sysinternals was bought, they had an excellent array of freeware and open source applications on this page. Microsoft has made the vast majority of these programs available for free but they have changed the licensing by closing the source code. According to the licensing FAQ:

Q: Can I license or re-use any Sysinternals source code?

A: No. We will no longer offer the Sysinternals source code for download or license.

So imagine my surprise when a Google search brought up a link to the Sysinternals source code page! It appears that someone had either missed this page or intentionally let it up. As I was digging through the page, I did find that the majority of the links pointed back to Microsoft but the occasional page still worked! So I got thinking, if some of the pages are still there, are the source code files still there?

When I went to the root of the files directory, I was not surprised to see:

Directory Listing Denied

This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

So, if I was to determine if the actual files were still there, I would need the actual file names. This is when I decided to go visit the Wayback Machine.