This is the usual argument you hear when it comes to old Games. It often would take way to long time to "clean" them up from 3rd party contributions/licenses etc. For a OS this is a impossible task.

Usually the argument goes that it would take time/money to rewrite the parts they don't have rights to, but simply deleting those parts and releasing the (now broken) code would be much better than nothing. Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place. Probably a bad assumption in the case of games particularly.

> Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place.

Not only that but for any large company to release code somebody in engineering needs to look at it to at least know what all is there, the legal department needs to assess the risk of potential liability, then which license to release it under needs to be decided. Finally, somebody in a senior business role needs to sign off on doing it.

I think it's great when old code gets released but the reason it's rare is it gets complex and it's nobody's job to do it. That's why many such release are thanks to an employee deciding to care about doing it and having the internal cred and sway to push it through. Or, as it appears in this case, someone who had access to the code and is awesome enough to choose to release it anonymously years later when the business is defunct or will no longer care.

This would all be a lot easier if copyright itself had more reasonable term lengths.

As far as I understand, this is even true of lesser known old movies - even the work of figuring out who has the rights to what is unlikely to pay back, so it’s just never released in a digital format.

This is almost exclusively usually due to either producer credits or music licensing.

For the former, if it's really that big they'll just release it and keep a standard budget aside for if/when the unlocated people come out. The latter is what really blocks movies because it actively costs them money, so they need to be able to earn more than what it is costing them to release. This makes music-heavy/niche music films much more expensive for potential broadcasters/streamers.

As a minor musician, I have to say I find the entire legal model around music to be effing ridiculous and more harmful to the art and society than the benefit justifies

It all disproportionately benefits big names and corporations while small time creators and performers get screwed.

The moment recordings came into play it all got screwed up.

Before recordings every musician made their living exclusively from performances and every musician copied each other constantly.

We lost so much with the advent of recording and the associated development of copyrights etc.

The proof is in the numbers: management and corps take the lion's share of revenues within the industry, with the actual musicians and creatives getting a paltry pittance.

don't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible.

The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

From memory they got their TCP/IP stack via the MIT licence

BSD license, because Berkeley was literally paid to port TCP/IP to Unix (and C) on basis that the resulting code would be available for incorporation by others free of charge.

Why would parents prevent publishing of source code?

Unless you mean that someone could see that you implemented their patent and retroactively go to sue them?

A license to use someone else's code doesn't necessarily include permission to publish the source.

A patent isn't permission to use their code, that would be a copyright.

A patent is a method, not an implementation.

We’re not talking about patents. Software licenses are about me allowing you to use code that I wrote, which is copyright.

Literally the person I initially responded to said:

> The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

We are talking about patents because Wengo brought it up and I was asking how they are applicable here.

If the licensed code was written by a patent licensee, then to replicate it in-house you’d also need to license the patent yourself.

Their code for Zip folder compression/decompression is licensed from a 3rd party.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...

What is "NIH"? Google only mentions health institutions.

"Not invented here" syndrome

Not invented here.

We should just shorten copyright to get around that problem.