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.