While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn't worth if something wasn't popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there's nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?
I thought to those delisting reasons:
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Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that's a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said "you only have 6 months to get this game, act now" and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they'll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like "uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I'll think about that"
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Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it's using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
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Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who's going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
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Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn't want to be associated with that anymore
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Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn't work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they're unable to patch it.
In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.
If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:
- Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a "near mint" edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)
And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an "illegal" torrent.
In short: they don't want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work. closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc and you can’t just publish them, or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
the concept is great, the implementation faces some pretty big logical challenges
Why do you say that?
I don't see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that's what matters. The same thing will go for the library: if the person/company that made the library stops supporting it, it has to become opensource as well.
That's up to you to clean it up. It's just like publishing any repository online.
Anti Commercial-AI license
because i’ve been involved in open sourcing products and libraries on many occasions
that’s not the way a lot of these things goes - especially when you start to talk about hardware. lots of times there are NDAs around even the interfaces to their libraries.
or sometimes there’s things called “vendored” code, where the library is included with the source. sometimes that’s easy to pick apart, but sometimes it’s not, sometimes someone’s copied and changed code from the library and barely documented what’s been done
code is often very messy. it’s easy to say ugh what shit devs! but that’s the reality, and we all write code sometimes that we look back on in a year and think it should have been a crime
that’s what i’m saying - it’s not like open sourcing is free. open sourcing software has a cost. people asked above different questions about eg who does that when a company has gone bankrupt?
i’ll add my own: how do you ensure a company doesn’t skimp on the dev time to open source, and accidentally release a secret that opens vulnerabilities in devices that people still use? like a signing key