You do not appear to understand abandonware. Abandonware is basically 'old warez,' and it is not legal to distribute commercial software even if it's not sold anymore. The only reason abandonware is so common is because the copyright-owning companies don't really have any reason to try to sue people who distribute such things, because they aren't making money from them anyway. But unless the company who owns the copyright specifically makes it public domain or freeware (which has happened in a few cases of very old products), it is technically illegal.Originally posted by t94xr@Oct 18 2002, 06:06 AM
Once something is classified as Abandonware its under i think its GPL.
If distributing Microsoft software is illegal, hell who uses MS-DOS anymore???
By GPL, do you mean the GNU General Public Licence? That has absolutely nothing to do with abandonware. It is a software licence for open-source programs.
No one ever said distributing Microsoft software is illegal. Microsoft has made quite a few small free programs, such as their Video Editor, an old Windows 3.x program I still use to make animations today, and I think it's completely legal to distribute such things as that.
As for MS-DOS, no one uses it by itself anymore, yet I use the DOS prompt from Windows for tasks like copying files. It is very powerful. You can make a list of all mp3 files on your C: drive with the following DOS command:
dir/s/a/b/o:n c:\*.mp3 > mp3list.txt
Let us see you do that in Windows Explorer. Heh heh heh.