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Not just science, factory equipment that needs ancient computers to function too. If you’ve ever wondered why some old PC parts are surprisingly expensive on eBay…
It gets worse than this.
Not only does most scientific instrument software become abandonware, but there are companies that sell instruments that use the exact same components as they did 20 years ago. The only difference is now they swapped the stainless steel parts for plastic and charge luxury car prices for what will be a piece of garbage in 3 years. These pieces have nothing to do with chemical compatibility and everything to do with increasing the frequency of maintenance that the older models never needed.
Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
piracy isn’t theft, but how do you feel about “stealing” from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers’ labor.
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can’t handle drivers and for security reasons can’t get low level hardware access.
