I would like to add to this discussion for a number of reasons...
If you have read any of my other posts you know that I teach copyright and patent laws (just the basics, I'm not an attorney or anything) and I DO believe that the laws are broken. I'm not sure we can fix them given the powers that be.
However, my concern is the preservation of software for history...for the future. I'm not talking about just having an ADF image of Deluxe Paint but what about the source code? It would be nice for many of these programs and their source code to be archived some place safe.
I believe people should be paid for their work and I understand the purpose for copyright and patents but I also think they need to adapt for the digital world we live in. I'm sure we've lost a great deal of source code to some awesome applications, games, and even operating systems (AMIX comes to mind...).
I'm a supporter of putting knowledge back into society. If its not making money for someone, if its been abandoned, if no further development is planned, why not put the source code out there for others to read, study, and learn from. You have no idea who is going to read it and what it might inspire them to do?
There was a push to have MacPaint's source code released so people could see how such a program written in Pascal (and 68kasm) could really function in 128k of memory. Bill Atkinson had a hard time finding a copy of the source code and this was only 20 years after it came out...
One last thing... I see many students show up and laugh when I tell them my first computer had 64k (well 48k really -C64) and I did OS work on an OS that was less than 1 meg (AmigaOS). Now, I mean they laugh but they are really very skeptical that you could write anything useful in that kind of space. They truly don't really understand working in that kind of environment. So, seeing this source code, working with programs like this, I do believe it has educational value.
Cheers!
-P
