[bee_rider]

It is sort of funny that the one type of software that manages to get any momentum behind it for this sort of thing—games—is really pointless (I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal).

For work software, it definitely should be able to run locally and without any license server or whatever. I’m baffled by people who don’t feel the need to own their tools. Open Source software mostly seems to fill this gap for me, but like most of the folks here, I only really need programming tools, which are over-represented in the open source ecosystem for obvious reasons.

Proprietary “freehold” software, I dunno. It could be interesting. I guess I kinda feel like: if your software isn’t going to do DRM, talk to license servers, or whatever, I guess your business model must include the fact that people will probably make unauthorized copies of your software. So, maybe just open source it? Then you have the classic “building a business on my open source library” problem, which is very hard, but at least you have lots of company.

[dpassens]

The big difference between open source and proprietary but freehold seems to be precisely that those copies are unauthorized. That already eliminates most of your competition as nobody else can sell your software and distributions can't just distribute it. Sure, people will pirate, but even DRM doesn't seem to prevent that.

[majewsky]

> I enjoy games too, I just don’t think preserving most of them is a big deal

Games are undoubtedly one of the most significant forms of cultural artifacts of our time. (For example, contemporary games arguably inform youth culture significantly more than contemporary literature does.)

If your emphasis is on "most", then this is a pretty silly argument: By this logic, we also ought not preserve any movies in our national libraries because most movies are cheap entertainment or outright slop. Same for any other form of media really. Sturgeon's Law and all.