I’m sad to see that this was downvoted, it’s contains the key questions. I think they have good answers. 1) Eventually, everything will be lost anyway. The ori

I’m sad to see that this was downvoted, it’s contains the key questions. I think they have good answers. 1) Eventually, everything will be lost anyway. The original print of King Kong is gone. A fire at Universal Studios wiped out the masters for a lot of music at once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_fire . Floods destroy family photos all the time. But those are examples of the forces of decay, of natural entropy, of error. The Library of Alexandria probably contained a lot of useless crap but also nuggets we’d want to know today. Information is memories, useful information is useful memories, and there’s no compelling REASON to lose it. Other sections of usenet history were wiped out when Google acquired it (a lot of comp.database.olap content I had a hand in) and groups of people just lost a knowledge base. 2) It’s not simply code that no one uses anymore. It’s a knowledge base on how and why, debates over constructs and usage that are useful beyond code-sharing snippets a la Stack Overflow. 3) There is an argument for letting some information get lost or at least super-obscure, but it’s hard to see this being a good example. Tide Pod Challenge videos come to mind. GDPR and right to be forgotten mandate something akin to information loss. 4) I posted this elsewhere but I’ll share here too: there was a comment made on the original article about preserving prior art for IP (patent) purposes. That alone is in the public interest. Irrelevant to your questions in general, but pertinent to each of them in this case.