Warez and Abandonware

markm writes "Stephen Granade, webmaster of the interactive fiction site at About.Com has written an excellent article on the warez and abandonware scene. It's worth checking out, even if you don't participate in trading warez." What are your favorite abandoned games that you'd like to try playing again? Would you pay?

Comments

What is the product, really?

[Bingo Foo]

The product, in the case of computer games, is the entertainment, the diversion, the thing that you find worth spending time with.

The product is not the list of bits on the disk.

If game companies made old games freely available, it WOULD cut into their new business. You can not simultaneously argue that they should free these old games since you would love to play them and argue that they aren't losing business when they free the old games.

The week you spend playing Bard's Tale is one week of delayed revenues for Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition.

Bingo Foo

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This is why.

[mindstrm]

They are public companies, mostly.
As a public company, their Intellectual Property is viewed by the investment community as an assett.
A company giving away it's assets for no monetary gain runs the risk of having it's directors in some severe class action lawsuits, for improperly managing company assets.

THAT is why public companies don't just 'give shit away because it's the right thing to do'. Because even if the Management, and the Board think it's okay... it opens a VERY REAL door for a class action lawsuit from the shareholders.

Please don't leave behind !

[Taco Cowboy]

To all software authors,

For crying out loud, when the users pay money to purchase the programs you wrote, the did it because of their trust in you.

I am not a warez user, nor will I ever be. I respect the goodworks and time and effort you've put into your software product, but if you ever decide to ABANDON the product you have written, please consider the users who have PAID THEIR MONEY to purchase the product! Please, don't leave them holding the empty bag.

The VERY LEAST you can do is to let the users have the SOURCE CODE of the ABANDONWARE, and let them decide what they (the users) gonna do with it.

I am speaking from experience, both as a user and an author of an already abandon software. I feel very sad that after I have paid good money for something - which I thought might have SOME MORE MILAGE TO GO, for years to come - and wake up to find that the software I use can no longer be used on newer OS environments, and the original author has decided to abandon the product altogether !

One example I can point to is Optasm, an excellent Assembly Language compiler. After the author sold his company (along with all the copyrights of his software) to Symantec corp, Symantec decided to DISCONTINUE the development of Optasm, and YET, they (the folks at Symantec) steadfastly refused to release the source code for Optasm, and we, the users who have appreciated the way Optasm compile the assembly code, are now facing NO OPTION but giving up our favorite assembly language compiler altogether.

Had Symantec releases the source code to Optasm, I bet someone (even perhaps moi!) may try to modify it to run on other OS environment, including the Open-Source ones, such as Linux or FreeBSD !

Now, I am not saying that the assembler language utilities for LInux or FreeBSD is not good, but if you compare the way Optasm did the compilation to those currently available for Linux and FreeBSD, there's just NO comparison at all!

Hopefully, one day, Symantec will come to the conclusion that releasing the source code for products that they have decided to TOTALLY ABANDON may generate goodwills for the company, goodwills that may reap MORE BENEFITS in the future, in term of support and sales of future products.

Let me re-iterate my point again, I am NOT interested in Warez, but please give me the source code of the product if you the author decides to abandon it.

Thank you again for reading.