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.

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

Originally copyright was like 15 years and if the thing was really good for you then you could Apply for a second 15 year term.

30 years is a long time to get a monopoly over something. As a human being, 30 years is a significant part of your entire lifetime. From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives. They're retiring, some who smoked or did other things are dying of old people diseases.

I believe strongly enough that 15 years is a reasonable copyright term that my book, the graysonian ethic, which I published in 2021, has a note on the legal page releasing it to the public domain 15 years from the first date of publishing, and in jurisdictions where you can't do that, it's licensed under the creative Commons zero license

If I want to own the rights to another book, I can write another book. If I can't make back the money that I spent writing and publishing it in 15 years, then that's a me problem, not a society problem the police can help enforce.

The famous song Happy Birthday left copyright only a couple years ago, and not because it timed out. The song which was written in the era of my great grandparents only lost protection from the largest state in history because after a hundred years no one could keep track of who owned it anymore.

I work in an astrophysics department and this is exactly why we almost exclusively use open source software

Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It's used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who's retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain

Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.

Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical

It's a good read, read it.