I'm not sure I understand all the fuss that has been made over getting source code. It seems to me that the questions that need to be answered -- such as how separable IE is from XP, or perhaps generally how separable the GUI is from the OS, etc. -- can be answered through fairly simple inspection. For example, the fact that Windows has long had a shell= variable or registry setting (and I assume this is true in XP, though I haven't bothered to look at XP yet), with the default setting shell=explorer.exe, would get someone a long way towards trying to separate out the shell component from the OS. The fact that a product like 98Lite exists is also a lot more revealing than poring over the source might be.
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I'm not sure I understand all the fuss that has been made over getting source code. It seems to me that the questions that need to be answered -- such as how separable IE is from XP, or perhaps generally how separable the GUI is from the OS, etc. -- can be answered through fairly simple inspection. For example, the fact that Windows has long had a shell= variable or registry setting (and I assume this is true in XP, though I haven't bothered to look at XP yet), with the default setting shell=explorer.exe, would get someone a long way towards trying to separate out the shell component from the OS. The fact that a product like 98Lite exists is also a lot more revealing than poring over the source might be.