I read your article on recycling software, and immediately thought of the big land trusts. You may have heard of these enormous trusts, like the Nature Conservancy. These organizations leverage
an investment in land for environmental purposes. For example, they might purchase a big stretch of land that is environmentally sensitive, encumber it with a restriction saying that 90% of it must be left in its natural state, and then sell the least environmentally sensitive 10% for a commercial development, or whatever. This way, a relatively small investment leads to the protection of vast expanses of natural land.
I wonder if something similar to this could be used to free old software and make it useful again. Perhaps a small corpus of donated funds could be used to purchase the rights to old
programs. Executables are made available for free, and source code is sold for a small amount sufficient to fund additional purchases of old software.
It is just an idea with rough edges. There are probably many ways of accomplishing this. But the land trusts may provide a useful example.
After reading this article, I also found several web sites that discuss this issue, particularly with regard to intellectual property. See here, for example:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/bearman/12bearman.html
This guy Bearman seems to have done a lot of work in this area, though his emphasis seems to be on creating an electronic library of free-to-read documents, rather than on creating a software repository.
thczv
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