Game Source Code Collection

This is truly one of the treasures of archive.org, which has so much valuable content on it I can't imagine what life would be like without it.

I'm going to present this amazing collection of games and their source code to my local kids computer club and maybe spend a few hours de-tarball'ing and building some of these wonderful games.

To the people who maintain archive.org, I salute you!

I can’t get past the DRM they allow, if they stopped doing that and raised the bar I’d likely support them.

I believe their stance on DRM is something like:

• We (archive.org) can choose to either take in these DRMed works, archive them, and publish them online for public consumption (with their DRM intact); or we can refuse the DRMed works at the door, and thus have them unavailable for public consumption, also leaving them unpreserved; or we can archive the DRMed works, but just not publish them (again leaving them unavailable to the public.) The one thing we can't do, legally, is to just ignore the wishes of the rightsholders and put up a DRM-less version of the content for public consumption. The rights-holders are still out there to sue us. So we have to pick one of the other three options.

• One day, the rights will expire or the rights holder will disappear, and the work will enter the public domain.

• If we had earlier rejected even archiving the work because of its DRM (from some principled moral stance, as you seem to be suggesting), then at the time the work enters the public domain, we won't have a copy, and would have to then acquire one. It might be impossible to acquire a copy to preserve at that point.

• So, it’s better to acquire a copy now, under license; and then just crack the work out of its DRM later once the work becomes abandonware. (As the Archive.org staff have proven happy to do and/or support, with e.g. 4am’s work on the Apple II software archive.)

• Plus, even if we did wait to acquire the work after its rights lapsed, we would likely have to crack it anyway. Rightsholders that go to the trouble to re-release their own works without DRM are pretty rare. Some rightsholders are so lazy that, in “anniversary” re-releases of their products, they use the community’s cracked copy! So it’s not like we’re making more work for ourselves by choosing to take in DRMed works and then crack them eventually. It’s just how it has to go, to ever archive these works at all. The likelihood of ever just "coming across" a non-DRMed version of the work at some point in the future is practically nil. (It would be like hoping that if you left an aged painting on the market long enough, it would just de-varnish and repair itself.)

• And, of course, we can start on the DRM-cracking process as soon as we get the work, and keep the de-DRMed version as the canonical version to do preservation work against, as long as that’s not the version we make visible to the public (until the work becomes abandonware.) Museums and libraries have many works in “private archives”, and those archives still hold value to the public: academics can usually access them for studies, for example, as this explicitly falls under Fair Use. But more importantly, the private preservation of works that can't be preserved in public, ensures that they're preserved at all.

I hope that makes it clear why either the first or the third options (give the public the DRMed version; or preserve the DRMed version but don't publish it) are better than the "refuse DRMed content at the door" approach. Which of those other two options you favor is up to you. Personally I'd rather the public have some access to this rights-bound content rather than none.

I find the views in the about section to be interesting. Seems this collection has gotten a massive spike of views in the last month of ~9,000 people, which is ~30x that of the last few months. I wonder if this comes down to hacker news, because at ~70 votes this post would have a view / vote ratio of about 125x, which seems in the ballpark but maybe a little high?

As you would guess California is the most common origin for views but surprisingly Alberta comes in second with 1/2 the views of California! Are there lots of fellow Albertan devs here?