I have spent years disassembling many old software titles and re-writing, optimizing and re-asembling them in 68k to work with my various Amiga set ups.
While it would be nice to see much of the original source code for old software open sourced, the main problem is most authors source code (including mine) are much varied in the way the are written and sometimes even with notes, they are not very clear or easy to understand and work out without a hell of a lot of effort.This applies mainly to source code written in C.
I have found that the best way to update old software is to disassemble it into 68k and then sit down and study it, then re-write, modify, optimize and/or add new features that suits my own needs.
This is especially true for software that was originally written in C (yuk) as the optimizations achieved in size of the code can be as much as 40% and in speed as much as around 30%.
I can guarantee that I use personally on my system lots of programs that the Amiga community uses, that have new features/improvements are highly optimized, bug fixed and are generally much more improved than the original.
Even after all this time where a piece of software is no longer making money for a company or the author & due to the grey & murky issues of copyright/ownership, their is tons of software just sitting out their fading away into obscurity because it's no longer supported or just forgotten about by the original authors.
This is a great shame as I have many old programs running that I have improved and which only I get to use because of the lack of interest by whomever own the copyright for them.
The companies/authors that hold onto this software have nothing to lose by open sourcing old Amiga programs, they no longer make money on them and probably never will now, but for whatever reasons they have for not allowing the Amiga community access to improve or update this software I don't understand and never will.
A lot of these companies & authors seem to forget that it was the Amiga that gave them their start in the industry, so what loss would it be for them to give back something to the folk who shelled out their cash in the first place to start them on their way.
