Exactly, it's subjective. What if I say that the only way to experience a game from 1995 in a 100% authentic way is to play it around that time. Unless you've been cryogenically preserved for 10 years; playing it in 2005, even with 1995 hardware, doesn't give you the same "experience".
But I'm not saying that - I'm saying that "preservation" isn't an absolute concept. Making old games run on new computers is preservation TOO.
The "100% authentic gaming experience" doesn't even exist, because the experience was/is different for everybody. I'll just stop here, because you can't argue with nostalgia.

Nothing can be preserved in it's original form forever, and someday all the old hardware to run games in their "original environments" will be no more & people will possibly forget how to recreate it.

Time moves on, and imo it's better we have stuff in SOME form for the future to enjoy than none.

(At least in the case of gog game versions, the game is usually more or less the same game...albeit in a different "wrapping")
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Agreed 100%

How many times the abandonware games are some altered versions (besides cracking copy protections, if there were such)? Like, never, unless it is specifically stated so?

Plus, as we know, GOG haven't had problems releasing games with third-party patches. See e.g. the Thief games or Deus Ex, or various other GOG releases.

The "abandonware version" is still the IP rights holder's property, there is nothing "illegal" about it for the IP rights holder to agree to release it, maybe unless it was some heavily modded third-party version of it, which they very rarely are.

These are digital products, these are not some physical objects that GOG would have to return to the IP rights holder in case the release agreement becomes null and void between the IP rights holder and GOG. GOG just needs to stop selling the game on their store, that is all.

Why exactly would the publisher care whether GOG cracked the game themselves, or used some well-known existing crack? And why would that be some kind of earth-shattering scandal? Publishers have used such existing cracks themselves in the past.

Here, I will give you an example, the Elite game downloads by Ian Bell, one of the authors of the original Elite game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)#Legacy

http://www.elitehomepage.org/game.htm

Check for instance the 68000/Amiga versions where he clearly states the version has a cracker group intro. So where is the big scandal? (I presume pretty much all the other Elite versions on that site are similarly cracked, ie. pirate versions.)

Even if some third-party cracker group altered the Amiga version code somewhat back in 1988, the game code still was Ian Bell's and David Braben's property, even in its slightly altered state.

Also, as I explained before, most PC games from e.g. around 1988-1998 or so didn't really have any actual copy protection that needs cracking. Floppy games at best had some kind of manual check (which doesn't necessarily need cracking if there is a PDF manual available) and many times not even that, and early CD games had no copy protection besides being on a CD-ROM.

If we e.g. talk about the MS-DOS floppy game releases, do you really think GOG gets working 30 years old floppy disks from somewhere, which they install with a floppy drive in order to create the game installation that they can repackage? Those floppy era games have mostly survived to modern days through abandonware sites, not through people keeping their floppies in safes for 30-40 years.

So if it is so highly questionable and illegal and immoral and whatever for the IP rights holder to use or allow the use of the "abandonware version" (which usually is identical to the "legal version"), how do you explain Ian Bell distributing cracked pirate versions of Elite?

I think you are way overthinking this.

This is not about whether one is for or against abandonware, which is just another name for piracy for allegedly "forgotten games".

Still, I am fully confident that if abandonware sites hadn't existed, many of the older classics we see on GOG today wouldn't have survived to this day, for GOG to re-release them.

I have a good number of 3,5 and 5,25 original game floppies for PC, Amiga, and C64, needless to say they all work perfectly.

I really can't see what's the big problem of finding working, original floppies.

I even got two 5,25 floppy drives simply by using the Internet and stating that I'm looking for such, and I got both of them free too, as the previous owners wanted to donate them to someone rather than throwing them away.

You make it sound like as if it's practically speaking impossible to find working floppies or reading their content somehow. It is quite possible, very cheap, and unless you are looking for some unopened shring-wrapped game copy, there are lots of opportunities to get what you want.

With GOG's resources and connections, I just can't buy the argument that's it's difficult to do any of that.

Googling for it, the life expectancy of floppy disks is at best 10-20 years, and it wasn't even clear from that whether it means that the floppy can be reused many times that long, rather than that it will keep data in it intact for that long (as for that latter there were also estimations of only a few years at worst).

https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/

Anyway, the last time I tried some of the PC floppy retail games I had from e.g. early 90s, like Rex Nebular, Wing Commander 1-2, Leisure Suit Larry 5 and Falcon 3.0, most of the disks had errors in them. They had been sitting in the cupboard in their packages for that long (I still have some of those boxes and floppies).

Also Finland happens to be one of the best places for data storage due to relatively cool and dry climate. In Thailand my old floppies and CDs wouldn't have stand a chance.

(Reading that same article, I was surprised how short time CD-Rs and DVD-Rs apparently stay good. No wonder so many of my old CD-R and DVD-R disks didn't read properly 1-2 years ago when I had a project to copy the data from all of them to my storage hard drives). Even the shelf-life for blank unrecorded CD-Rs and DVD-Rs is mere 5-10 years? Oh wow...)

The thing is that it's much easier for them to just DL the files from said sites, do some checks for malware to be safe & to make sure the files are more or less unaltered in other ways, etc.....than to go through all the trouble of finding original media in some cases.

(And the original media might not last too much longer for some games, even if there are original copies available, as timppu talked about)

Also btw: "those sites" are usually just carrying unaltered files just stripped of the copy protection....as that's how they gain trust and support from their users.
(Think about it....if such sites tampered with files and infected people's PCs I doubt people would frequent their sites as much anymore, if at all)

Also also, the ip holders still own the files...even those copies hosted on another site....so the ip holders can allow others to DL them, verify they're clean, and use them in things like legal GOG versions.

SIdenote: I believe some ports/etc of old console cartridge titles on some new console stores were later found to be versions from "those sites"....yes, legit (digital) stores using files from "those sites" as their versions.

Kind of agree with this. Given the resource constraints at GoG (see the various threads about the slow support etc.), I'd rather they focussed on building the library and fixing known issues.

Yes, people may find it annoying that it installs multiple copies of dosbox, but dosbox is very lightweight when it comes to HDD size - usually about 8.5MB. To put that in context, with the average semi-modern game having an install size of 30GB, you could fit 3,530 dosbox installs in that space. As you rightly point out, anyone who cares will have the technical expertise to do it themselves.

I've got slightly more sympathy for the "I'd like original, unaltered files" argument - but I also remember that the aim of GoG.com was to get old games working on modern hardware, not to preserve them on the original hardware.

However, for those who care enough, keep asking.

some of the games offered on gog is exactly like the original, liike imperialism 2 for example. that does not require any emulation software because it still works out of the box even in windows 10. i have even played cross version multiplayer with the old disc version and the gog version. gog have some times fixed issues in games to make them compatible, like kknd extreme, which could previously not run in multiplayer out of the box but, gog fixed it. the option of giving people a choice wether to install dosbox when installing dos games is a good idea.