[dleslie]

FOSS has always been plagued by the 80/20 rule. Most of it is garbage, of the remaining quality software most are no longer maintained, of the remaining maintained most are slowing in development, and of the very few left that are healthy and active, most are shepherded by a private company or two.

[fartcannon]

The only software that actually dies is closed source. And with it, all the money you spent on it.

FOSS will outlive us all.

[dleslie]

There's plenty of dead FOSS. Anything that relies on a library or build toolchain that's hard to find or configure comes to mind.

Go spend some time trying to get RHIDE working, for instance. You're going to have to bring it back to life to do so.

And yet, closed source seems to run just fine in emulation.

[fartcannon]

Luckily, I can bring it back to life.

Good luck emulating! That emulator's probably based on FOSS. :)

[dleslie]

It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.

[fartcannon]

But if you wanted to, you could bring them back to life. That's the value.

With the emulator, first you need to write that emulator, and then you only get precisely that version of the software. After that, you're toast.

[dleslie]

Sure, but I'd have a tough time finding proprietary software that I'd want to use that isn't adequately emulated. As for updating, well, I'm not going to be updating most FOSS, either.

Right now I can double-click an icon on my desktop that launches SimCity for Windows 3.1 inside of dosbox, and it works great. It didn't take much effort to get working, either.

I can't say the same for most dead FOSS that I've tried to resurrect. Usually I'll have to manage the outdated dependencies somehow, perhaps by writing a SHIM or somesuch; and probably significantly fiddle with the build system because Linux systems have changed significantly since the mid-90s.

It's a difference of hours versus days of effort. I've done both, but guess which I simply _haven't the time for_ now? I've got family and friends that need my attention moreso than a dead piece of FOSS no one but myself seems to care about.

[iforgotpassword]

I really liked the old Presto-based Opera. How useful do you think running an 8 year old browser will be today, emulation or not? ;-)

And the emulation argument can also be made for old open source software, so I don't see how that supports the argument for closed source.

Maybe I just got lucky, but so far I've only ever "lost" CS software, example see above, but never OSS.