Many years ago, I worked for a software company that included code escrow for our customers. If something happened to is, they could unlock the code and support it themselves.
It can be done, but probably only is in industries with strong companies for customers
Edit: lol, I haven’t realised I’m not in a video game subforum. But my point stands and I agree that old software should be pirated or downloaded for free if the proprietor is a jackass that no longer provide support but still try to milk every cent from a dead horse.
Devil’s advocate: old games don’t have great quality of life improvements that we take for granted today and having remakes could fix the issues.
I played Civilizations 3 again and even though the graphics still hold up quite well by today’s standards, the UI doesn’t hold a candle to the later releases. Suffice to say, I won’t be playing Civ 3 again despite having grown up with the game. Old games like Civ 3 requires you to have like OCD and be extremely patient, which is something you can’t really have as an adult with less time to play videogames. There are old games that would require retouching-- without the baggage of parasitic modern trends of course like DLshit and microtransactions.
I agree, I’m not saying companies should legally prevent consumers from playing old games. These games are twenty years old and companies should not try to squeeze every cent from the IP they have practically abandoned.
People with OCD struggle more with patience than neurotypicals. They feel an intense need to fulfil their compulsions right now, they’re bad at waiting.
Games publishers are in a war of attention and don’t want to compete with themselves. They won’t sell you an old game if they can get you hooked on the new version with microtransactions and DLC with no story and sub-par multiplayer.
The next point is just making the case for open source.
Some companies just make their new version compelling. You can’t get the experience of Balders Gate 3 by playing Balders Gate 1.
I think they’re all competing with themselves anyway, the biggest customer group for Whatever 5 will be players of Whatever 4. Giving away Whatever 1, 2, and 3 will increase sales of 4 and 5
I work for a company who’s main source of income is a suite of accounting, stock and job management applications, all of which are written in FoxPro. The community add-ons and support is incredible but there hasn’t been any official support since like 2009.
Microsoft bought the license for FoxPro, supported it for a few years then killed it off when VB came out. I wonder why xD
The crazy part is some of our clients are turning over 100s of millions in profit a year, using this crappy, mess of a system written in a dead language, by one dude 😂
True, but look at the documentation for IBM platforms and compare it to legacy documentation from Microsoft. People keep using it and part of it is because it has a lower maintenance cost than the short term costs of moving on. It’s not trust that exists in a vacuum, Microsoft has tried to sell too hard being a Microsoft developer using their Microsoft tools to ever have that legacy demand, companies will just use *nix instead.
Perhaps it could be like copyrights and patents? If you don’t defend them, you lose them, and in some cases they expire after a set amount of time and then they can be used by others
This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.
My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.
It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…
Ah yes, Compaq, the company that used non standard power supplies but with the standard wire coloring and connectors. I had several customers blow up their motherboards after buying standard replacement power supplies.
It’s reverse: you get a board that has a floppy interface on one side and a USB socket on the other. You plug in a USB drive and the board uses a file on the drive as the floppy disk, pretending to be a floppy Drive connected to the interface. It’s a little less convenient because you have to deal with disk images but it works without moving parts.
As long as it’s not connected to a network and is actually maintained, there’s nothing specifically wrong with Windows 98. Also just make sure the USB ports are shut.
It’s amazing even for the cheaper CnC machines in other industries running on Dos or Win95, 98, XP. I use to have to maintain the hardware of these older PCs as the initial outlay to replace the machines was fairly high compared to stress and much lower cost of finding old hardware.
In the end with the modem equivalent CnC machines on the lower end we would only see minimal upgrades to the functions of the machines, versus the updates to the software. Let’s me honest that would become obsolete yet again within a few years.
Capitalism will always capitalism. “Oh, we have to provide a healthy option? Okay, it’ll be the expensive option.” “Oh, we have to support software? Okay, subscription models only” “Oh, we have to pay our workers minimum wage? Okay, we’ll pay them not a penny more and raise our prices”
It’s an endless fight… Yet, we can’t stop fighting it, because attrition of our values and apathy in our actions are weapons the system uses against us.
Even books have the same. IIRC the ‘corrected’ version of Bilbo receiving the ring came into the Hobbit because the publisher wanted Tolkien to make a revised version to keep the copyright going.
(I presume the corrected version of that chapter was just taking advantage of the opportunity, but still…)
This post is so true. I work in local government in a state that has TONS of money, yet our systems to control the information for agents to determine if you keep your kids or not is still based on MS-DOS. it’s insane to see in 2023
Using something like DOS is neither preferred nor more safe. Last time MS DOS received a security patch was 23 years ago. It’s open to pretty much any security vulnerability you can think of. In case you depend on a DOS app it’s preferable to run it on a modern OS that is DOS compatible, windows 10 32bit for example (I believe Win11 still has support). Or even better sandboxed in an emulator like DOSBox on a more secure OS.
I really don’t want to rely on security through obscurity… MS-DOS was written back when every programmer trusted everything that ran on the computer, security wasn’t even an afterthought, and encryption was the sole domain of math nerds, conspiracy theorists, and the nerd equivalent of doomsday preppers because it was “too computationally expensive.” Its sole saving grace in terms of security is that it doesn’t support multitasking so malware can’t run in the background, but you can just target whatever software it’s running, instead.
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.
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.
Property other than what you personally use to live shouldn’t exist, but if we’re moving away from capitalism, IP is not first on the list of things to abandon
Also, I could see some forms of IP being higher on the list than others. A market socialist setup, where every company is a worker owned co-op, would still have a lot of use for Trademarks. It could be a far less abusive system than the one we have now, but we’d still want it to exist.
Market socialism itself is likely to only be a transitory step, though.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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