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Well, I would say this is an ethical question. The stores sell the Linux-compilations so people who don't have internet (not many in our time, but still) can still have Linux. The CD's of the magazines also bring people who don't have internet things they could use. That's their work, they put all those things together on CD's and perhaps added instructions or manual, so they are in the right there to sell them.
This guy / lady uses the work of others though, the only thing of him there are the instructions and even they are rather work of others than him. So what could he get the money for? For work of others, while doing nothing on his part. <_<

[mika]

I half agree and half don't. The thing is that people pay for convencience goods all the time. I buy those magazines all the time, so that I don't have to download it from the net. The magazine is making money from me but they did nothing to make that patch/demo/etc... The guy/gal is charging for getting all the games together into one convenient package.

Think about flowers. We all go and buy flowers from florists even though we could probably just stop at the side of a road and pick them ourselves. Not that great an analogy but it still puts through my point.

[The Niles]

Linux is open source but you can still legally sell it. You can even ban people from redistributing it as long as you own some copyright on what you are selling (there is no Linux but in fact many many diffirent version of it). Linux distributors do far more then grab a kernel from the net and an assortment of programs, put in a CD and call it their own. These people spend years writing their own code.

Abandonware is not open source. There are people who have spend the better part of two years or more developing these games and just because they no longer sell or support it does not mean others can simply proffit from their work. Even if a good is open source you cannot use it for profit if you have not made it yourself and don't have permission from whoever did.

Magazines put CD's/DVD's with their magazines as a bonus and a convinience but people (you might be an exception) buy the magazine not the CD.

The bottom line for me and the law is that you cannot profit from other peoples toils without their concent. This is stealing plain and simple.

[Unknown Hero]

Originally posted by The Picard@Sep 13 2004, 12:37 PM
What we are doing is illegal.

Why is this illegal? :not_ok:
We only want to help people get easily old games they miss so much. <_<

[Havell]

yes, it is illegal as the copyright from these games has not been released but as noone stands to profit from these games, noone is going to sue us for suppling them. What the site is doing is illegal but it shouldn't be.

[Chef Boyardee]

Originally posted by mika@Sep 13 2004, 10:38 AM
Hey Chef, don't you wanna send me an invite?

Haha, sure actually. What's your email account? I'll send you all gmail invites if you want.