When, in 20 years, we're hearing that this disc got lost again sometime in the bankruptcy chain of Activision Blizzard, we'll see whether corporate archiving or vigilante illegal archiving is more effective.

Is there any risk that the compiled binaries, on millions of computers and available for free and legal download from Blizzard, will disappear in 20 years?

No. But the source is useful for other purposes than compiling , especially with original comments.

For rarer games, and those shipped on DRMed/copy protected media, it's certainly possible to get into a situation at risk of losing all known copies of the binaries!

I'm not going to berate the guy for doing what he thought was right, but reading this news doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Just mixed feelings.

It seems that you think that following the law is the right thing to do. That's an understandable point of view. But there's also something called civil disobedience. Sometimes the will of the commons should trump law. Is this one of those cases? Frankly, I don't know or care. But I think if you don't try to understand what you call the "vigilante" point of view, you're doing yourself a disservice.

How is it civil disobedience, if private citizen violates right of another private citizen (or in this case corporation)?

civil disobedience in my mind is when private citizen stand's up to what he perceives as unjust system or law. And I can't see what unjust you see here in this case.

The way I see it is simple a lost property returned to an owner, and reward for person who found it