Abandonware is a thing and I remember there being some legal headway made recently in that respect, but Starcraft isn't abandoned. They just released a compatibility patch and made it free to download.
I don't think it's reasonable to argue against archiving when it clearly has cultural significance.
Reading and learning from said source code is, and should not ever be illegal.
Sure, legally. But the question is whether we care. Ethics are relative.
>whether we care
But I'm glad that there are those who get it.
This would effectively limit copyright to the products' natural lifecycle and prevent hoarding the bits "just because I can", thanks to copyright imbalance.
The source by itself is hardly (monetarily) valuable, pretty much to anybody. Blizzard clearly still has other copies, and anybody else wouldn't be able to do much of anything commercially with the code.
It's quite possible somebody has even already reverse engineered much of it, rendering it even less valuable by itself, even to copy-cats.
Starcraft reverse engineered to run on ARM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372414
Pretty much nulls all of the 'no commercial value' arguments I see here.
The code doesn't give you the legal permission to distribute and brand a game Starcraft. The reality is the code has no commercial value, the brand on the other hand may as well be a license to print money.
Even if the code was still similar to the original one, the non-HD version is given away for free...
Q: How did you go about replicating all the unexpected “bugs” that made BW micro
so special? Did you simply reuse code from the original game, or did you find a
solution to replicate the nuances of BW’s gameplay?
A: StarCraft: Remastered is able to achieve this effect as it uses all the same
gameplay code as Brood War. This means that Dragoons and Goliaths are still a
bit derpy in how they react to movement commands. The Reaver’s shot doesn’t
always find a target. Mutas stack.
The fact is that the gameplay is identical enough that old replays from 1.16
will play and work just fine under StarCraft: Remastered.
It's a bit like losing Leonardo Da Vinci's paint recipes - it's a loss, but it's not a big loss. The important thing about his art is the art itself. The same is true of Starcraft.
I found one on Lincoln, but it was just some cat photos and backups of selfies from the cessation of the Civil War at various Reconstruction projects.
...its not?
Chiefly because Starcraft is not a normal game.
This is a game that defined a cultural generation in South Korea, established e-sports singlehandedly and in many ways made the RTS genre what it is today.
It should be archived. Even if it can never be released due to copyright or other legal nonsense it shouldn't be left to a commercial entity to ensure it survives.
It's not like you found the source to the latest Halo game or something.
This is like finding the source to the original Halo game, of little to no commercial value but of immense cultural value.
Where possible these artefacts are archived so they will be around long after the companies have folded.
Unfortunately it's just not possible most of the time as companies end up taking their software to the grave.
Which makes this all the more depressing. This was an incredibly rare opportunity to archive something of cultural significance to millions of people, completely wasted because it fell into the hands of someone not equipped to deal with the situation properly or contact someone that does.