Von Fugal wrote:
In fact sad sad is the day you want to use an old piece of software (maybe a game, most likely in fact) that is long gone and not only no longer supported but it's not even purchasable AT ALL. It's terribly selfish of one to think that nobody will ever want to use their software and improve upon it once they are gone or have lost interest in it. That may be their "right" under current law, but it's a crying shame when it happens.
Case in point: I got a copy of the $15 commercial version of Tux Racer (for Linux) one Christmas. The commercial version turns out to be far more fun than the open source version: the tracks have a lot more variety, there are several characters, doing consecutive tricks earns a lot of points, there is a 2 player mode, and the music is good enough to play loud. Sunspire Studios once said they would release the commercial version as open source, but they never did, and now the company has vanished. It's getting harder to keep it running since it depends on old libraries. In 10 years it will probably only run in a virtual machine, since all the libraries it depends on will have long since moved on.
The source code probably still exists somewhere. If only I could get it (with a Free license), I would happily do the work to modernize and distribute it.
Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
