4 ms·

After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.

• donedealomg 8y ago
  Why? Because Communism?
• brylie 8y ago
  It should be required to submit software sourcecode to the Library of Congress in order to claim Copyright. That would enrich the public domain. Aside from the fact that Copyright lifespan is absurdly long.
• gus_massa 8y ago
  Latest TeX (not LaTeX) update was in January 2014, and the change was in a quite obscure tiny corner case of an advanced feature. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf > The new version of TEX differs from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it. Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails? Also, what about books series like Harry Potter?
  • AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails? I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been touched for so long.
• mhd 8y ago
  Big codebases tend to contain licensed code or at least depend on it, so you'd get code that's either illegal to publish or contains huge gaps. Getting it in a state where you can put it on github, would require quite some dev and legal work, not likely to happen with abandonware.