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It's not "completely free;" it's just pirated proprietary software that Microsoft hasn't bothered to take down yet.
The definition of Free Software (a.k.a. "open source") is having the legal right to read, modify, and redistribute the source code, not merely the technical capability.
Microsoft doesn't own it, they didn't program it. They paid a license fee to the developer to include it in Windows XP.
Whatever -- whoever holds the copyright hasn't bothered to take it down yet. Point is, even if it's abandonware it's not legitimately "free."
(Also, I'm technically correct anyway: Microsoft owns GitHub, so it'd be the one acting on the copyright holder's DMCA request. 😛)
Despite what Take Two would like you to believe, reverse-engineering software isn't illegal unless it's for circumvention of security measures (oversimplified). Distributing copyrighted assets, on the other hand, is. Since the GitHub repo doesn't include the game assets, the only legal DMCA takedown that could be made here is against the Play Store app, in which case, Google would be handling it.
All that said, there doesn't even seem to be a repo for this. There's a different port done by someone else (fexed) last updated over two years ago, but this particular port seems to be closed source. Last update on Play Store was yesterday, but the last time any fork of the main repo was updated was last month.
You do know the code is copyrighted too, right? Reverse engineering isn't the issue here; uploading the result to GitHub is.
Yes, the original code is copyrighted. A recreation of the code, however accurate, isn't. Do you really think Nintendo would let decomps of so many of their games fly if they thought they had legal grounds to remove them?
This isn't a reimplementation though, it's a decompilation and recompilation of the exact binary and code.
No, that's not how copyright works. Decompiling creates a derivative work, which is still copyrighted the same as the original. In order to have a proper clean reimplementation, you need to use a "Chinese wall" procedure whereby one person documents the behavior of the original program and then another person writes a new program from scratch using that description, without ever looking at the original program's source code.
I don't claim to know what Nintendo or its lawyers are thinking, but the law is pretty crystal clear that merely decompiling a proprietary program doesn't magically make it not proprietary anymore.
EA (through Maxis) likely still owns this as it was part of their Full Tilt Pinball game. I can totally see EA pursuing this just because of their inner evil.