My implication was that if you're going to share source code, share it in a useful way.

This particular source code is from an extremely old version of Photoshop, there would be no potential commercial harm whatsoever from allowing people to reuse this source code however they want.

I could have lived with the "no commercial use" restriction that's typically used, but to not have a right to redistribute at all severely restricts its utility.

Given that the commercial value of this particular source code drop is effectively zero, I fail to see what Adobe being a billion dollar company has to do with anything. Nor do I see what this has to do with the "OSS" movement of "Free Software" in general, neither of which were mentioned in my original post.

This was provided to a museum for historical purposes. It could also be useful for other research or educational purposes potentially. And one day the copyright will expire.

Except lack of redistribution rights also complicates research and academic study since technically you can't even share any derivative work among colleagues.

Copyrights that may expire long after my death also don't seem like something I should be grateful for.

>This particular source code is from an extremely old version of Photoshop, there would be no potential commercial harm whatsoever from allowing people to reuse this source code however they want.

It's not that easy I guess. Even Photoshop 1 has tons of patents in it's algorithms.

Photoshop 1 is old enough that any such patents should have expired.

If that is true you could reimplement Photoshop 1.0 with the clean room method [1] and have a perfectly legal clone, which you would then be free to expand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Does Photoshop 1.0 have significant features that are missing in Gimp?

> I could have lived with the "no commercial use" restriction that's typically used, but to not have a right to redistribute at all severely restricts its utility.

As long the web site stays up, everyone is free to go there and download it for himself/herself.

It means that something like the excellent annotated source reviews by Fabien Sanglard of Quake[1], Quake2[2], Q3[3], etc.. aren't possible.

Nor any ports to attempt ot make it compileable/runnable.

Code isn't supposed to be hung on a wall. If you can't even collaborate to make it work again, it does lose a lot, and waiting ~95 years isn't really a practical alternative.

Will the website stay up that long? Is archive.org allowed to preserve it?

[1] http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php

[2] http://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php

[3] http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php

You could always make references to the original code.

"There" a billion dollar company alright. "There" are also many companies that embraced OSS and realized it was profitable as well.

Few and far between. Actually only one that makes any big money: IBM, and they sell services on top of OSS as they did on top of proprietary stuff. Nothing very OSS about them.

On the other side, the road is paved with failed OSS companies that were praised as "really getting it", starting with the archetypal one: VA Linux.

(btw, is my typo that amusing to you? Wait till you find out about cat videos then...)