Comment on Hi all! We have a new mod on the team.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 4 months agoconservative is about traditional values and personal liberty. Most of what you list would fit squarely into conservative philosophy.
Abandonware though does not fall into politics. I am a big fan of keeping historical technology around. I may be showing my age but I miss a lot of the software from my youth.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Oh, abandonware is political. The software is lost because distribution rights lied solely with the copyright holder. The abandonware we still have available for distribution today is what was pirated. Obviously, copyright is antithetical to software preservation.
A capitalist argument on the subject of software copyright goes “the right to distribute software is owned by a company or a businessman because they invested in that software. They have the right to control what they own. If they decide the software is no longer available for distribution, it should be lost.”
But a communist argument on the subject of software says “the means of producing wealth by distributing software should belong to everyone. The people should seize software distribution for themselves and use it for the common good. Pirate software to preserve it, it shouldn’t matter that a corporation doesn’t want to sell it anymore.”
As a communist, I believe in the conservative approach to software copyright.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I am in the middle. I believe a company should be able to make money on its software until they abandon it. Once they abandon the software, it should be free to use.
I hate to see technology go away just because someone stopped selling it.
Same with movies, TV shows, etc.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 4 months ago
How are pirates supposed to get copies of software that’s already been abandoned so they can distribute it?
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Well in the old days we would all have copies of the disk to spread around. I still have hundreds of floppies for C64 software. I still have 3.5 for my Amiga.
I am starting to think I am a closet pack rat. I have lots of really old technology I have been carting around for 40 years.