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Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

I think that for games like those, which more or less defined entire generations of people (the ones that were into gaming ofc) in a lot of countries, it should be mandatory that their source code is made public after like, ten years or something.

Sure, a company created it and it should be its intellectual property for enough time to return the investment etc. But something ingrained so much into people imo trancends that and should be considered belonging to the public realm.

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I can imagine a policy mandating that for all commercial software, source code goes into escrow for automatic release 10 or 20 years later.

The company doesn't have to be around anymore, rights don't have to be negotiated, etc.

Short of that I wish more companies would do it voluntarily. I'm not into id games, but they're one example that comes to mind.

This is critical imo, if only because software are cultural artifacts that should be able to be archived just like any other cultural artifacts.

Have you ever heard of free software? ;)

I have never heard of compulsory source releasing

Any law in the end requires a violent threat. This suggestion implies that someone who does not publish their source code should, after som ignored formal letters, get armed men sent to their office to kidnap whoever is responsible.

All nice sounding laws, such as gov funded welfare, gov funded hospitals, gov funded schools, and the endless regulations, implicitly carry a threat of violence, and when judging the ethics of a carrying a law out, that violent threat must be included. Government is firstly about guns.

Quite the slippery slope fallacy.

You're also conflating civil and criminal law. Copyright is civil law. The government doesn't send the FBI in to ensure some publisher respects that a book's copyright has lapsed.

Of course there is a violent threat behind copyright law as well - enforcing the right to ownership or the right to copy. Why else do you think anyone complies with laws, or cares what government decides? Government is about violent force

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