We already had a lot of architectural transitions throughout the computer history (a very small part of which I witnessed) and we could emulate nearly all of the deprecated architectures quite well. I am optimistic that it can be repeated.
Authors rights (or "moral rights") are not a big problem. While you usually can't sign those rights away, they don't generally prevent the author from signing away distribution in perpetuity, so while you can't get "total" public domain in those cases, you can usually sign away most of the rights people are most interested in.