It's interesting that the Library of Congress would say something like that given that there's no legal concept of "abandonware." -- Unless I missed some very recent developments.You're allowed to crate an archive of abandonware, including ways to circumvent copy protection. However, the definition of what constitutes as an "archive" and "abandonware" is rather dubious.
Many EULAs back in the day encouraged making backup copies of software, and this is a practice I still hold today with my modern software. (Most of which ends up on a network share in my home, and that server gets backed up.) Most software vendors don't really care if you have a second copy of the installer, so long as you don't...even if it means making backup copies
But arguably even transmitting "backup" copies to other unlicensed parties over the Internet (free of charge) and letting them use it (with your serial/authorization, or with one they found or invented) is still illegal and still piracy.make a load of unauthorized copies, lay out a blanket on the front lawn and sell them to others for a price, aka piracy
One of the most woeful things about the Classic Mac OS scene is that we've got a lot fewer good hobbyist programmers (like Cameron and tenfourfox, for example) than some of the other platforms like IRIX and Solaris have. Part of this is the intent of the whole platform. The Mac, when it was new, was made for writing letters and balancing checkbooks -- not really for hobbyist programming usage. Another part of this is the architecture of the software on old Macs. It's easy to write and compile a new version of libwhatever.so on IRIX and then replace the system file with it. The whole thing is UNIX95 (or UNIX98, I forget) and POSIX compliant, and is fairly predictable. Firefox may not have stayed up to date on that platform, but a lot of other stuff has.it is perfectly reasonable to make the investment in producing your own version of the software
Of course, that also presumes anybody has a commercial interest in the continued running of a 68k Mac. I'd be interested in hearing/seeing more about it if this was true.
I'm not going to tell if you don't, but just because I agree that this is probably okay doesn't mean we can use the site to transfer those files. (I know you're all aware of this, go with me here for a moment.) ALthough in a world where we could (Let's say copyright law was suddenly and extremely changed to match Knez' suggestion in some way. How would that all be cataloged and distributed, and who would be responsible for it? Archiving is something that it turns out few people on a scene really agree on. Although I personally think the act of archiving and organizing information is really interesting. Like, information organization is one of the reasons I like computers so much, so it'll be interesting to see how that shakes down, should a version of the universe where we can do that manifest itself.Strictly for personal use, you can likely get away with using actual unlicensed software on ancient computers.