Yes and no. There's a lot of things you can do when the software is not owned or restrained by a single particular person. GoG could still charge for the older games, but they could offer more support that they couldn't offer before for compatibility purposes, like accessing the source code directly (if it still exists). If worst comes to worst, they could offer all the older games totally for free, and then have a donation box option where you could send them money if you wanted to. It would get used, trust me.



I remember doing a lot of reading from Richard Stallman (a few years ago) on free software; Programmers and people can still pay to have software modified to their needs or tastes, add updates, new content unofficial patches, etc. Redhat was known for years for charging for their CD's and their OS that you could download for free; BUT what you really paid for was technical support.

It's possible when a game goes open source when copyright ends, merely means that the sources are available. This means you COULD download the sources and the full game, BUT you'd have to compile it yourself, and quite a few people would pay for the simplicity of not having to pull out a compiler, get into the nuances of the source code and other details in order to build their binary of the game.


Copyright with the printed press, you were trading certain freedoms (that you couldn't take advantage of anyways), in order to publish books; The books were accessible by the public so there was no problem. The digital age is quite a bit different and many copyright laws that were applicable in the 1930's don't apply in the 2000's.

But being annoyed at copyright law, or wishing for changes isn't going to make a difference. It probably won't be resolved in my lifetime.