This is something we've discussed as admins, but aren't really ready to make any changes about. There are some opinions though.
I'll do my very best to delineate which of these are mine and which of these are the site's.
So, from the site's perspective -- posting "abandonware" (even links to it) is not allowed because it is not legal content. There are software
preservation efforts that exist, but most of them aren't really targeting systems that this site focuses on. (And rightly, so it makes sense to look at the oldest systems first.)
"Abandonware" as a concept doesn't really exist, and a lot of people hwo try to talk about it (here and elsewhere) don't really understand. In addition, even among people trying to make it a thing, and people who really are lawyers, there's no consensus as to what should be abandonware and what's just "previous versions."
There's also no "fair use" of old software. Fair use tends to apply to media that can be "quoted" or reproduced for satire, explanation, or educational purposes, which isn't really "old Mac stuff" especially since some people
really are using 68k Macintoshes professionally, as in part of a workflow that makes them money. As such, it would be unfair to say or presume (and also dangerous to use this in an argument) that "nobody" doing things on 68k Macs benefits from them, commercially. It's uncommon, but it does happen, on this very site, in the last year or two.
Another issue (again, something that is frequently misunderstood) is that almost all Mac software (certainly, anything people actually want) was commercial or shareware. The vast majority was this way, and because of reasons, this is the stuff people want. Nobody wants a six-line utility, and there's almost no interest at all in most shareware. Another thing, for commercial software, the Mac (even software from the early '80s) is recent enough that almost all of that software is still controlled by its copyright-holder, or somebody who still owns that property. Very few things were
actually "abandoned."
For example, Aldus doesn't exist anymore, right? Wrong -- Aldus got bought by adobe and PageMaker in particular got developed until 2001. Another interesting situation is stuff that's "said" to be abandoned and released. A lot of people think SimCity 2000 was released, Corel WordPerfect 3.5E, and this discussion has even happened about Adobe Creative Suite 2. A mistake on the FTP server or a kind gesture to registered owners doesn't an abandonware make.
So, now for my personal opinions.
Software preservation is important. This is a point that's lost on many "archivists" who have yet to agree on a standard disk imaging format (there were many, disk images were very common on Macs) and who have yet to come to a concensus on how things should be archived to begin with.
Mac Garden is probably one of the worst sites out there for this. Most of their stuff is outright broken, and because everything's stored in different formats, the site's curators can't agree what is and isn't abandonware (For example, when Illustrator CS3/13 was new, Illustrator 9 had bee posted to the site) and many of the downloads are either lifted straight off of people's hard disks, simply don't work, or have viruses on them.
13-15 years ago, and more, there was a pretty active Hotline/KDX scene. Everybody pirated stuff (just as stuff gets pirated today) but direct links to it were still a no-no on the forum. How you got your software was really up to you. You could have bought it new (AppleWorks 5 and Quark XPress 4 were still on sale in 2000/2001) or you could have gotten it with the machine, or you could have downloaded it from somewhere. It was... typically irrelevant to the discussion on the forum, and I don't think fifteen years ago, software preservation was on anybody's mind quite the way it is these days.
Most of those hotline servers did a better job having things that worked properly and that were virus checked. Part of that is because nobody was making a really big jump to their 68k Mac, usually I downloaded files I wanted for any given computer directly on that computer. These days, there are those kinds of considerations to make, And of course, there's a pretty bit lack of HL/KDX servers even online these days.
This kind of thing is one of the things that I think about, and that I'm fully aware the 68kMLA isn't doing the best it could. This rule was something that was already in place when I joined the forum so many years ago. It has been enforced differently over the years, but the rule itself has been there for a long time.
I personally agree that copyright law in the US (and probably globally) needs to be revisited. However, I don't have the resources or wherewithal to make that point here on this site and try to fight it, so my stance for the site itself is to stay as far away from potential trouble as possible.
I'd still personally prefer that it not get linked, but I also understand the challenge of -- how do new people to the scene get their systems running and get software and games on them?
It's not necessarily an easy question to answer.
