🚀 go-pugleaf

"Andrew Rybenkov" <arybenkov@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>On Sat, 06 Jul 2013 02:01:50 +0400, John Lewis <john.dsl@frontier.com> wrote:
>
>> Do you have some grudge against GOG ??
>
>I do. Exactly because
>
>> You may not know, but GOG.com is an offshoot of CDProjekt Red
>
>I know it.
>
>1. Some Polish guy at rpgcodex told that one of cofounders of CDProjekt
>made his initial fortune by selling pirated games in 90s.
>I don't have the link (though if someone really cares he can search the site
>for the name and info). I have no reason not to believe that guy.
>
>2. Now this CDProjekt again sell the games as it seems legally.
>Well, maybe de jure it IS legally but morally it is wrong from all sides.
>With time most old games became de facto abandonware, public domain.
>Peoples downloaded games, found solutions, built utilties to play old games
>on "modern systems". Obscure owners did not care. Everybody was happy.

There's no such thing as abandonware legally and lots of games were
posted on abandonware sites whose owners most certainly did care and
sent cease and desist letters as soon as they found out.
The abandonware sites then take those games down.

It's not like abandonware sites actually tried to contact the owners of
the IP and ask if they could post them, they just went ahead and did it.
They knew damn well that if they did contact the owners the owners would
say no and they counted on the owners never finding out.

>Now appears a shady company that began to sell the games using community's
>solutions, efforts. Wow! God blessed us! Really?

You call them shady but you like abandonware sites which are the very
definition of shady.  Seems like you have a moral compass that's
spinning freely.

>Consider: there was a landlord who had an orchard. Later he moved to some other
>place. Local folks began to visit the orchard, they even built ladders
>to reach tall trees. Landlord did not care, he just did not want to sell
>the land. Heck with the orchard. Then out of nothing appears a sleazeball,
>what call the owner, and tells he can make money of the orchard.
>Owner answers whatever. Now sleazeball takes a seat in orchard and
>tells everybody you should pay me. And me, being so kind person, permit you
>to use those ladders for free. (One of ladders has name - DosBox ;)

Except I'm pretty sure GOG has to pay the owners of the IP to get the
rights to distribute.

Which is the equivalent of the Landlord RENTING the land the orchard is
on to a tenant and that tenant can now charge people for the fruit that
they were previously STEALING, since it's his land and orchard now since
he's PAYING FOR IT.

It's not like the landlord put up signs saying "Free Fruit, take what
you want" and now the tenant is charging for it.
He just wasn't having people arrested for stealing it before and now
he's sold it to someone else who can do what he likes with it.

That's the difference between stuff that's made available for free and
stuff that's being stolen but the owner can't be bothered taking action
about.  You can bet if they were chopping down the trees for firewood he
would have cared since unlike fruit, that doesn't grow back soon and
would have devalued his property.

Freeware is free and if GOG was trying to sell it, you'd have a valid
complaint, kind of, since presumably GOG provides some support. 
Abandonware is owned property that abandonware sites are making
available for THEFT (legally speaking) - GOG buying that property from
the owners and selling it cheaply is a service, not a sleazeball move.

GOG just means you can have a copy of that old game _legally_ now, not
just steal it off the internet and face charges if you ever got caught
with it.

There's no such thing as abandonware, there's freeware and owned
software - if the owners really don't care about the IP, they make it
freeware.

Xocyll