Software produced by now defunct companies, or for historical machines that have fallen into obsolescence, has been described by some as "abandonware" - in other words, software that has become defacto public-domain due to it no longer having an interested owner. The vast majority of programs labelled as abandonware are old video games (often in the format of ROM images).

The abandonwarering.com FAQ discusses the issues involved at http://www.abandonwarering.com/?Page=FAQ

So, how do WikiZen''''''s feel about this? Should people be allowed to freely exchange software that now has a commercial value of zero and nobody to call daddy?

Good question. I ran across this recently with Claris HomePage. Claris used to make both HomePage and FileMaker. They have since completely (and publicly formally) abandoned HomePage and dedicated their whole operation (including renaming the company) to FileMaker. The issue arose as to whether they would/should release HomePage into the public domain, given these circumstances. This would be useful from an educational point of view as HomePage is a very easy to use web-page formatting program and could be put in schools to give kids hands-on, low or no-cost web publishing experience. Claris (FileMaker) however, has refused to do this as they claim it would violate licensing agreements they made with other companies who contributed pieces of technology to the HomePage program. Essentially the legal-weasels enforced a PassTheBuck strategy.  -- AndyPierce

''If you are interested in following up the fight - it might be useful to ask them if they will commit to such a release if you volunteer to acquire the appropriate legal releases from the copyright owners involved.''

I took some source code with me when I was laid off from Alphatype Corporation back in '90. It was for an incomplete project that I had put a lot of time and effort in to and Alfalfatype was never going to complete or use. I just wanted to have my little baby (a UNIX to MS-DOS link for an embedded UNIX board) with me to have and hold. Two years later Alphatype was no more. The bank liquidated all their assets, ''including'' the engineering computers - workstations and servers - that all the development of Alphatype products had been done on. There were several companies offering to buy the source code rights from the bank, but they would have nothing to do with that. The computers got split up, the source code was all over the place, and all those megabuck applications were homeless. Third party support firms chased down as much of the code as they could, but a lot of it got trashed. After that I could show my baby in public without worry. These days this piece of junk sits in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. I guess a lot of "abandon-ware" has this kind of history. -- MartySchrader
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See: MameEmulator