First post, by doshea
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Not by moderators here though - so I wouldn't go posting links directly to it - but by the current owners of the intellectual property!
Embarcadero are the owners of the development tools/IDEs which the former Borland company sold. Their site at https://delphi.embarcadero.com/, which is currently celebrating 29 years of Delphi, has a very long home page talking about Delphi's history.
Early on, the page has a "Wayback Machine" title which grabbed my attention but turned out to not be about the archive.org service.
However, further down the page it says:
Delphi Books And Software Archive Circa 1995
Feeling nostalgic or just curious about all the original manuals from dawn of Delphi and other Borland products?
with a Take a look button. I imagined that they'd perhaps provided some .pdfs of old manuals on their site, but the button actually links to archive.org, with lots of their old manuals and software available for download!
I thought it was a great step that archive.org was able to host games in Windows 3 environments on its site - making "abandonware" very accessible to people - seemingly without Microsoft giving it a takedown notice, but I think having a company actually link to this stuff is a much bigger thing, a bit closer to an explict approval.
Their search query string covers 1978 through 2004 inclusive, so I suppose one could infer that someone there - who might just be an unpaid marketing intern who has never spoken to the legal department for all we know - has decided that their threshold for "abandonware" is 20 years.
I do note that they didn't explicitly say "feel free to download any of the stuff we linked to", maybe they meant to look but not touch 😁
Of course, unless they re-license any of that software, they could still enforce their original licenses and Copyright over any of that software. I'm not a lawyer but I assume this doesn't really change the legal state of the software. It just seems like a good hint that they're unlikely to enforce their licenses, and if they did, the fact that they linked to it themselves would seem like useful evidence in one's favour in court.
I imagine that this isn't going to make the staff of this site suddenly feel comfortable with us linking to Borland software on archive.org and I think that's fair since - as I said - I don't think this changes anything legally, at least not in a clear, unambiguous way. Perhaps on some site run by a lawyer they wouldn't mind it because they wouldn't mind being a test case in court or something 😁 I hope my post doesn't create any stress for the staff and I hope it's okay to link to Embarcadero's site and point to where they themselves linked to "abandonware".
Here's a link to the page on the (real) Wayback Machine, since I assume they'll change their home page at some point: https://web.archive.org/web/20240218090713/ht … mbarcadero.com/ It looks like the link was there in May 2022 though, and if you go back to Feb 2020 it had a different query - for just creator:"Borland International" (which wouldn't have worked so well).
