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Actually back in the 70's and 80's licensing worked like this

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

I should explain how Atari’s Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari’s marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp’s “Foobar Blaster” on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing. In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel — our copy of the game hadn’t even been delivered yet)

I.e. the license was to make a clone of the game. There was no source code or documentation provided.

That's probably true for all areas, not just programming (although you should make allowances for dyslexic and so on). This is also mentioned in TFA. The original article is BTW 30 years of C. It's actually only a paragraph there:
2. Good programs do not contain spelling errors or have grammatical mistakes. I think this is probably a result of fractal attention to detail; in great programs things are correct at all levels, down to the periods at the ends of sentences in comments.
“Aw, c’mon! You’re kidding!” You might think that nit-picking like this is beneath you, whereupon I will start pointing out errors in your code. It was embarrassing the first couple times this happened to me.
I think this categorical statement ("does not contain") is a bit harsh, but there's certainly a relationship between clear thinking in language and style and the quality of content (the code).

Landon Dyer, who wrote/ported Donkey Kong for Atari 8 bit machines has a blog

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

It's actually a remarkable story - he was in charge of the 'port', but actually he just played the arcade game at his hotel, wrote a spec and reimplemented it from scratch. When it was done he had code that just fit into the Rom - only a 'dozen or so bytes' were free. It's easily one of the best arcade ports to the Atari too.

Actually since Atari is the topic, I had one back in the day and there are two things I saw demonstrated that I never could figure out.

One was a turbo loader for cassette tapes. There was a lump of electronics in potting compound and a normal cassette recorded. They claimed it could load from tape faster than an 1050 disk drive. It couldnâ(TM)t but it was pretty close. The lump of potted electronics was quite small and the sold the whole thing for about 40 bucks. I never figured out how they managed to modulate and demodulate that high a baud rate with what must have been a couple of Op Amps. I donâ(TM)t know how stable it was - probably not very - but I donâ(TM)t think it was faked.

The other was an Atari 800XL with a Prestel cartridge. It was displaying 40Ã--24 text in the Prestel font, which is easy to do on an Atari. But it was also displaying Prestel colors. They allow any character cell to have one of 8 colors (basically R1G1B1) in the foreground and one in the background. If you looked carefully the screen looked like Mode 0 with a strage overlay color, like they used the player missile graphics or something. But PMG doesnâ(TM)t look like it can handle the worst case where either the background or the foreground can change each character square. It was sort of flickery too, though not as bad as if they interlaced a color frame and a text frame alternately.

I quite like the way this blog by an old time Atari employee recalls the when and how of Atari developement. Something (Donkey Kong port on Atari consoles) that read

I should explain how Atari's Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal.

made it clearer with :

We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing.

but, wait... there was even less:

In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).

was for me a sure way to a plentiful of nostalgiaholic reading.

Al.

I quite like the way this blog by an old time Atari employee recalls the when and how of Atari developement. Something (Donkey Kong port on Atari consoles) that read

I should explain how Atari's Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal.

made it clearer with :

We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing.

but, wait... there was even less:

In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).

was for me a sure way to a plentiful of nostalgiaholic reading.

Al.

6502 and 68k were early RISC, Z80 was early CISC. All differences stem from that.

And yepper, I wrote assembly (spare us the "it's assembler!" Nazis) for all three.

Couldn't beat the 6502 for fast memory access and movement, IMO - read: graphics on a Commodore or Apple. Couldn't beat the 68k for handling large tables. Couldn't beat the Z80 because everything I did in it was under CP/M - and yes, you could too trace BDOS. :)

We used a outboard 68k tied to an Apple ][+ - if that rings a bell, then this surely will: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1064

And as an IT person, it is my job to be conservative as Hell about what goes on my company's computers. And if I'm being consulted about a decision I need to cover my own ass and be as pessimistic as possible, because if something goes wrong on the technical side and I'm the one who gave the thumbs up, guess who gets the blame? Even if the sales person told me something completely wrong.

The alternative is that I'm not consulted, have to integrate some horrible software into our system, and pray that it works. And if anything goes wrong, I'll probably have to spend hours on the phone talking to whatever poor schmuck on the other side has to deal with this mess (and I doubt that it is the sales rep). I've been on both sides of such messes. I don't like either.

Either way, I think it is understandable that whenever I heard the phrase "sales representative" I mentally prepare myself for taking a shower in prison. So are you really going to wonder why you get treated poorly by IT workers?

I dunno, Landon Dyer of Atari regrets taking part in busts

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1031

All Linux distributions that existed 13 years ago can be upgraded to the current versions (along with all software and users' settings).

Right because upgrading Linux installations always works every time.

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1007
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=322418

Also good luck downloading a new installation over the sort of internet connection these machines will have in the third world. And good luck trying to get tech support when it fails on some percentage of the machines when you can't afford an international call. These people pay an absolutely higher price per bit transferred or per minute of transatlantic call than people in the first world pay but earn 10x less. It was literally cheaper to call from Sweden to Thailand than to call from Thailand to Sweden. Their internet access is far worse too. On the other hand commercial software is 'free' because piracy is rampant.

The fact is for the sort of people these machines are aimed at, no updates means that security holes will stay unpatched.

And realistically would any software support upgrading on a 13 year old machine? Over that time filesystems will have changed. Linux is about progress, not back compatibility and no one is willing to do the work to maintain old ABIs or filesystem formats. In fact they often deride Microsoft for caring about it.

Even worse, over 13 years instruction sets change. And support for old ones are dropped in new software.

There's loads of scope for breaking Linux updates.

I actually think that given that these machines are going to be passed to technically unsophisticated people with poor communications access, Linux doesn't seem such a good idea.

Of course, being one of many Microsoft marketing people in this thread you can't know this.

Hmm, doesn't that seem a bit of an ad hominem attack to you? Even if it were true how does it affect what I'm saying. Hell, I spend my time working on embedded systems at work, but Linux was too much trouble to maintain at home.

Leonardo Dicaprio is making a movie about the history of atari...

Is he going to play Landon Dyer?

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987