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Apple Older Software Downloads

Because it's a bad protocol. Did someone say PASV?

SFTP (or WebDAV... or AFP/CIFS/NFS) for your own stuff, HTTP (or Gopher, if you must) for not your own stuff.

 
An SSL certificate can be had for $5 a year these days (well, $6 for one year or $15 for three), so if anyone wanted to make those links available via https, it isn't difficult. Perhaps I should do that with the Apple Software Downloads.

 
markyb86 said:
I'm fairly certain they own their own servers.
Click to expand...
I don't mean that they are paying for someone else to host the files; what I'm saying is that the files are taking up storage space that could be used for something else. So take the following as an example:

Current size of Apple's website (including obsolete software) = a.

Size of obsolete software = s.

Now let's suppose that Apple need to make their website bigger. Let's call the new size b.

The amount by which the website has grown in size, g, is b - a.

If Apple were to keep the obsolete software on the website, they would now need to purchase g units of extra storage (whether that be off-site hosting, cloud storage, or hard disks - it's irrelevant, they would still need to get extra storage).

If Apple instead took the obsolete software off of the website, they would only need to purchase g - s units of extra storage.

Clearly, no matter what their hosting arrangements are, they are saving money.

 
onlyonemac said:
Current size of Apple's website (including obsolete software) = a.

Size of obsolete software = s.

Now let's suppose that Apple need to make their website bigger. Let's call the new size b.

The amount by which the website has grown in size, g, is b - a.

If Apple were to keep the obsolete software on the website, they would now need to purchase g units of extra storage (whether that be off-site hosting, cloud storage, or hard disks - it's irrelevant, they would still need to get extra storage).

If Apple instead took the obsolete software off of the website, they would only need to purchase g - s units of extra storage.

Clearly, no matter what their hosting arrangements are, they are saving money.
Click to expand...
You started trying to do math, but you didn't continue. The iOS App Store, for instance, has 1.4 million apps with more than 75 billion downloads. In October, 2012, the average size of an iOS app was 23 megs, according to ABI Research. 1.4 million * 23 megs is about 32 terabytes. This estimate is on the low side because the average size of apps has increased over time, but let's just go with the data we have.

Apple's legacy downloads is less than 8 gigabytes. This is about one fiftieth of one percent, or about 1/4000 of the size of the storage used for the App Store just for iOS apps. It's also accessed and downloaded significantly less than apps or current updates, so it probably never in the history of Apple even got cached in the CDN - it probably always lived as a static directory on one of Apple's servers.

It doesn't really matter - there's no cost in leaving files on a fileserver. Nobody runs a server at 100% of disk capacity, so the amount of storage ends up just being a rounding error. Buy a 2 TB drive for a modest server and it'll cost 40 cents one time for the amount of space that those downloads would take.

I'll post something when I buy an SSL certificate for mac68k.org and the files are available there for download :)

 
So now that even Apple's given up on this old software, is it considered "abandonware"? I just wish they'd issue a statement that says it's OK to redistribute the likes of OS 7 and OS 8. With these multi-billion dollar lawsuits they're faced with on a daily basis, you really think they care about someone downloading 7.6.1?

 
They're not going to do that. Their lawyers would beat them silly for "giving away" intellectual property - whether they ever intend to use it again or not. That's why these things always seem to be a grey area. They probably don't really mind, but they cannot formally condone it. If pressed for an answer,  they'd say "no". That's (for better or worse) the modern legal landscape - if you don't fight to control your IP, somebody else will exploit it and then you have less say because you didn't defend your ownership. The only way such companies could get away with it now is to pass it on to another small company, like a foundation they started. I think Sun did this with OpenSolaris before they were acquired by Oracle.

Small companies are more likely to be explicit in declaring things abandonware, because they aren't as beholden to investors and legal teams.

 
Something like system 7.6 not being available for free doesn't make sense, because apple cannot gain or lose any money by allowing it to be shared. I know theres more to it than just giving it away, but I really don't get it.

 
If a company basically says, maybe by their actions and nothing explicit, that they don't give a crap about a product any more, then I think people should be able to do with it what they want. It would be like you taking something out of someone's bulk garbage and they complain, "Hey that's mine!". Yeh, but you were throwing it away, right?

 
We can argue back and forth about this concept until the cows come home. But it still isnt going to change the fact that its still a grey area until someone decides to take it to court and draft up laws governing it... (mostly bad, sometimes good). 

"technically" software and technologies are proprietary and they are intellectual property. Since technically anyone never owned the software, you just leased/licensed/borrowed the use of it. 

So apple still owns it. So until they relinquish their rights to the software, (sell it off or release it as freeware) its still theirs whether its in use or not. 

 
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krye said:
If a company basically says, maybe by their actions and nothing explicit, that they don't give a crap about a product any more, then I think people should be able to do with it what they want. It would be like you taking something out of someone's bulk garbage and they complain, "Hey that's mine!". Yeh, but you were throwing it away, right?
Click to expand...
The only problem with this is that intellectual property laws do not work this way.

 
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I cant remember if I downloaded it or not, if I did, i can probably either FTP or dropbox it, but over 7GB might be a bit hard. 

 
Last edited by a moderator:
It finally worked for me. Tried from another machine and it downloaded  it 2-3 hours...

Thanks.

The archive is indeed 7 Gb compressed, and 12 gb unzipped.

 
So we have mirrors of all the classic Mac OS updates, but what about Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.3 and contemporary software (like FCP 4.xx, for example)? Many of those updates seem to be very hard to find, if not impossible.

I'd like to gather every possible update to FCP 4.x.x, but I'm having trouble finding them.

c

 
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