Why old, retired but iconic software is almost never open sourced?

5 points by begoon 11 hours ago

Why do people rarely open-source old and retired bit iconic software long ago?

For example, on top of my head, but there are lots others:

- Norton Commander - Turbo C and Pascal (at least DOS versions) - Lots of DOS early games - Clipper - Different FIDOnet and BBS related programs

Will these sources die somewhere and never be revealed? :-)

Someone 8 hours ago

It may not be clear who holds the rights to the source code.

The developer may not have the source code anymore.

Even if they do, they may not have the rights on third party libraries, third party source code, or digital assets.

Releasing source code has risks. Source code can include profanities or use terms that nowadays are considered inappropriate, or patent holder may inspect it to find patent infringements, and sue.

Most of the time, there’s very very little benefit, if anything at all, to the developers in releasing the source code.

_mitterpach 10 hours ago

It is really interesting to look into the problem of software copyright and how you can really struggle trace the ownership and who owns what now.

For a video that's (surprisingly) closely related to the topic, see CGP Grey's video on the flag of Antarctica:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0wTDK0VOeY

(The most common flag used for Antarctica was created for the 3D World Atlas software, so presumably whoever owns the copyright to that software now, owns the copyright to the flag of Antarctica)

  • solardev 4 hours ago

    Why does a continent, not a country, even have a flag? Who "uses" it?

kwertyoowiyop 8 hours ago

Given there’s no fiscal incentive to, I’m (pleasantly) surprised whenever it does happen.

dcminter 11 hours ago

One good reason is that it's not always obvious who has the rights. Even if the copyright holder is clear it can be hazy whether there might be outstanding NDAs and licensing deals that would cause problems.

So it's usually safer and (importantly) cheaper not to bother. You need either an insider keen on their own initiative to open it up, or a powerful PR reason to do so.

It's a shame, but probably unavoidable. I think we ought as a society to at least dramatically shorten the copyright period for software (it's obvious that something like the patent system's 20 years would be more than sufficient) but I can't see much chance of it changing.

> Will these sources die somewhere and never be revealed? :-)

Sadly, yes, mostly. :'(

  • rbanffy 10 hours ago

    Would be interesting to have some place to dump the source with a date for disclose it set in the future far away to ensure the work is in public domain by then.

ferguess_k 9 hours ago

Some thought:

Everyone who sells a piece of software should send the full source code to an offline depository (e.g. offline tapes or disks), and will be published after X years of sales.

Of course this is just my daydream.

  • Jsebast24 8 hours ago

    Message ChatGPT

    "Write a source code for the following binary file. Divide the code in the simplest possible modules and add comments to make the code easy to understand..."