WinWorld

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 30, 2016, at 2:07 PM, Christopher Satterfield <christopher1400 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:50 AM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>> 
>> In any case, the concern some of us have is that the "abandonware" site,
>> by its definitions, clearly does not appear to care about licenses or
>> copyright.  That should give those of us who DO take care to operate by the
>> rules -- with proper licenses and all that -- concern, because it makes the
>> community look like it doesn't care about property right, when in fact a
>> lot of the community DOES care about these things and only some
>> disingenuous types ignore the subject.
>> 
> 
> For the most part, the companies whose software is on the site don't really
> seem to care. A few of the sites have been around 10+ years and rarely does
> anyone speak up, mostly just Nintendo. I know the guy who runs Winworld and
> he's not gotten any DMCA takedown notices on the site contents and to the
> best of my knowledge neither has BetaArchive who also has a fairly large
> archive.

Sure, and that makes sense.  This means, of course, that making a good faith attempt to get permission and then use the Google approach :-) is reasonable.  What isn't reasonable is a blanket assumption that anything that's even mildly old is no longer something its owners care about.  Some software does have a long business life; consider CDC NOS, which dates back to the 1960s but still had real world customers in the 21st century.  In that case, when the owner was asked politely, permission was given for hobbyist use under certain restrictions, very much like we have seen with OpenVMS.  Come to think of it, OpenVMS is another example of software substantially older than 7 years.

	paul