Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
piracy isn't theft, but how do you feel about "stealing" from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers' labor.
Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I'd rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.
It gets worse than this.
Not only does most scientific instrument software become abandonware, but there are companies that sell instruments that use the exact same components as they did 20 years ago. The only difference is now they swapped the stainless steel parts for plastic and charge luxury car prices for what will be a piece of garbage in 3 years. These pieces have nothing to do with chemical compatibility and everything to do with increasing the frequency of maintenance that the older models never needed.
It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books.....and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like 'pay me for my brilliance'.
Absolutely. Free flow of information without pay wall allows humanity to collectively build upon itself.
At the same time, paying people who generate, develop and curate information, enables and encourages more people to do so. IMHO one of the amazing things about the open source movement is it's built on so much generosity of time and resources.
Could your average joe even afford to buy a single one of those handwritten books? Or even read said book for that matter...
Yes, but it's important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.
A monopoly is thought to inspire creation, if that's so IP is good, but should be on human timescales.
100 years of monopoly won't inspire me any better than 20 years, and even most cooperate products have less time in production than that
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It's used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I'd have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90's or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.
So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.
A rabbit hole, just for you:
https://myabandonware.com
https://gamesnostalgia.com
https://abandonwaregames.net
https://oldgamesdownload.com
https://archive.org/details/classicpcgames
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
Hey, thanks for the links! These got my childhood in them!
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe
When Windows dropped support for XP, our NMR lab decided to change the OS of the PC linked to the NMR machine to Linux. Since I don’t work there anymore I don't know if they were able to do that successfully.
I don't know how we can't legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just... throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it's going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it's just garbage.
how we can't legislate
because "we" don't own our government, the parasites who profit from the thing you want to change have all the power. labor needs to organize, the alternatives are capitalists killing us all or
The US (and all of their allies) are in favor of wealth redistribution to the ultra-wealthy, so predatory practices like this will never be stopped unless there is a sufficiently organized and pissed off mass movement calling for it. Researchers are a tiny group, so it won't happen.
Not just science, factory equipment that needs ancient computers to function too. If you've ever wondered why some old PC parts are surprisingly expensive on eBay…
Out of curiosity, I ran through some sample quizzes of the A+ exam a while back. Managed to pass, but I had to dig out a lot of my old knowledge about IDE master/slave setups and COM port settings and the like. That may be partially due to A+ being a silly, meaningless cert, but it's pretty clear there is a need for that crap still.
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that's also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can't handle drivers and for security reasons can't get low level hardware access.
On the other hand, something like ReactOS could, in theory, work if it was much more mature and had more developers behind it.
Ah yeah, drivers are another thing entirely. Especially for what I imagine is very proprietary undocumented hardware. The only thing that can help there is a reverse engineer / kernel module dev.
