WinWorld is an
online museum dedicated to the preservation and
sharing of abandonware ...
Sigh. It's unfortunate to see people pushing the
nonexistent and legally fa$
Well, it _is_ a meaningful term (albeit with a fuzzier than usual
meaning); if people write of "abandonware" most readers will have at
least a general idea of what is being referred to.
It's true that (at least in most jursidictions) it does not have the
legal status that people seem to act as though they thought it did,
but, heck, that's true of a whole lot of terms in wide use, some of
which even _do_ have relatively precise legal meanings - my own
favourite of these is "public domain".
And, unlike misused technical terms like "public domain",
"abandonware"
fills a gap in the language; there is - as far as I know - no other
term nearly as good for its referent.
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