I wish more were brave enough to just publish it with an open license, and then if the owner complains you take it down and rewrite.
Any damages for distributing 30 year old source code are hopefully in the single-digit-dollars range anyway.
This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary code.
You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.
When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.
The Windows NT 4 source code exists in multiple public repos on GitHub, and the one from the first Google result has been there for at least four years.
On the one hand, great, but on the other, that's how much (little) they care about Windows as a source of revenue.