Microsoft has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the operators of "Longhorn Reloaded," a project that was dedicated to reviving an earlier beta of Windows Vista from before the company removed certain features, such as WinFS. The operator of the site has since posted a message saying that he had removed the download link, and this was followed up by a statement from Jean-Marie Houvenaghel—the founder of the web site Joejoe.org and supervisor of the Longhorn Reloaded project—that the project was officially discontinued.
Longhorn Reloaded was an ambitious attempt to revive Windows Vista from the time before the project went through its infamous "Longhorn reset."That reset came August 27, 2004, when project leader Jim Allchin mandated that the Longhorn team abandon the work it had done on the kernel and start afresh with the kernel of Windows 2003 Server, in addition to removing key features such as WinFS.
The "Longhorn Reloaded" team took the pre-release Build 6.0.4074 of Longhorn—a version that still contained these features in beta form—and were advertising that they would "finish off what Microsoft started" by providing new versions of the operating system based on those builds. Without access to the source code, it is difficult to imagine how the Longhorn Reloaded project could have achieved this, but the basic idea was to remove the beta expiry dates and attempt to polish up any parts of the OS that could be modified. A news post on Joejoe.org claimed that the first "Milestone 1" release of the Longhorn Reloaded .ISO had over 25,000 downloads. Brief internal testing at Ars showed it to be a morass, and we did not publish the results of our time spent with it.
It's not surprising that Microsoft has reacted the way it did; the project would essentially be distributing a copy of Windows to people for free, in blatant violation of the license agreement. However, Microsoft might want to take note of the continuing interest by the community in abandoned Longhorn technologies such as WinFS. Currently, Microsoft is still working on WinFS as an optional add-on to applications such as SQL Server, but it has no plans to integrate it back into the main Windows tree.
While the Longhorn Reloaded Project may be discontinued, some users are still speculating about how they might continue the work, either by distributing files that modify Microsoft's beta release of the OS or by going completely underground.
Microsoft had no comment on the matter, as its spokespeople failed to return any queries relating to the matter.
Ars Technica