Thread
Apple Older Software Downloads
I bet you couldn't even measure the amount of money that it costs them. I have users and web sites on my main server going back to the 1990s - could I take the total cost of the machine, the total utilization and divide it up over fifteen years and figure out that Elfen's files and account sitting on the server account for 4 cents, but even just trying to figure something like that out would cost more than the thing itself.
Yeah, Apple has no decent reason not to keep those files and those pages exactly the way they were.
I also discovered why the 7.1 Update for System 7.0.x was never put up for download, apparently it was the very first SSW update that Apple charged for, and they'd never put up a product for free that they charged for, so that explains why 7.1 has always been missing.
I also discovered why the 7.1 Update for System 7.0.x was never put up for download, apparently it was the very first SSW update that Apple charged for, and they'd never put up a product for free that they charged for, so that explains why 7.1 has always been missing.
Yes they do have to pay for the storage. They would be using storage for files that almost nobody uses anymore whereas they could otherwise use that storage for something that a lot of people are actually using.-
They made MPW freely available on the basis that it was obsolete software, so I see no reason why they couldn't do the same thing with the System 7.1 update or any other obsolete software for that matter.
I'm fairly certain they own their own servers. The bandwidth used to download a couple floppies wouldn't even show up compared to downloading OS X updates. Small businesses and the like pay for their web hosting/storage. I doubt Apple pays for (as far as hosting is concerned) anything other than electricity, their connection to the internet, and maintenance for their servers.
Apple has their own CDN now, though they still have Akamai as a backup.
Helps when you own an entire Class A IP block.
Helps when you own an entire Class A IP block.
Ok. I invite you to do the math to calculate how much it'd cost to store 10 gigabytes of data on a worldwide CDN.
The amount of money is a non-issue. Rather, it's an issue that is the opposite from what you think - the money which was spent on the m68k and early PowerPC hardware which we typically have represents a much larger investment into the Apple which exists now than a top of the line Mac Pro bought today would make. The pennies (if the cost is even more than one penny) per month spent on keeping those old files is completely meaningless when it comes to the amount of importance that those products have in where Apple is today.
I agree with johnklos that people's investment in Old Apple is huge. I was just looking up info on the IIci I am working on and trying to fathom that they charged around $6k of 1990s money for this.
But tech companies - especially larger, image-conscious ones - tend to have a backwards approach to legacy products. Legacy is something of a dirty word for them, because it implies support for things they want to leave behind. Not unlike how I can practically feel the groaning over the phone when I try to still get some support in authorizing a program for OS 9. Much of this comes down to the image of their products and the use of them they want to project. This marketplace is fueled by novelty, so showing off the great stuff they were capable of 20-30 years ago can be perceived as extremely negative. Somewhere out there, there will be some git laughing beer up his nose at a System 7 video with the realization that "This is wut those great MACS look like LOL". Acknowledging their illustrious past does not help them to convey that they are The Latest Thing.
Also, the industry-wide expectation that any decent company offers instant access to everything via FTP has mostly disappeared over the past ten years. Even many university FTPs have disappeared. I think this "lets them off the hook" of maintaining these resources (not that it took much!) for security reasons. Secure FTP never caught on as much. Consider also the rampant bot-spamming to public spaces, such as has affected Usenet recently. I still think that FTP is one of the easiest, most effective ways to host and share data - but it has certainly lost favor with many.
But tech companies - especially larger, image-conscious ones - tend to have a backwards approach to legacy products. Legacy is something of a dirty word for them, because it implies support for things they want to leave behind. Not unlike how I can practically feel the groaning over the phone when I try to still get some support in authorizing a program for OS 9. Much of this comes down to the image of their products and the use of them they want to project. This marketplace is fueled by novelty, so showing off the great stuff they were capable of 20-30 years ago can be perceived as extremely negative. Somewhere out there, there will be some git laughing beer up his nose at a System 7 video with the realization that "This is wut those great MACS look like LOL". Acknowledging their illustrious past does not help them to convey that they are The Latest Thing.
Also, the industry-wide expectation that any decent company offers instant access to everything via FTP has mostly disappeared over the past ten years. Even many university FTPs have disappeared. I think this "lets them off the hook" of maintaining these resources (not that it took much!) for security reasons. Secure FTP never caught on as much. Consider also the rampant bot-spamming to public spaces, such as has affected Usenet recently. I still think that FTP is one of the easiest, most effective ways to host and share data - but it has certainly lost favor with many.
Because it's a bad protocol. Did someone say PASV?
SFTP (or WebDAV... or AFP/CIFS/NFS) for your own stuff, HTTP (or Gopher, if you must) for not your own stuff.
SFTP (or WebDAV... or AFP/CIFS/NFS) for your own stuff, HTTP (or Gopher, if you must) for not your own stuff.
An SSL certificate can be had for $5 a year these days (well, $6 for one year or $15 for three), so if anyone wanted to make those links available via https, it isn't difficult. Perhaps I should do that with the Apple Software Downloads.
You can't download System 7.5.0, only 7.5.3, which they did give away for free because 7.5.0, 7.5.1, and 7.5.2 all sucked so hard.
I don't mean that they are paying for someone else to host the files; what I'm saying is that the files are taking up storage space that could be used for something else. So take the following as an example:
Current size of Apple's website (including obsolete software) = a.
Size of obsolete software = s.
Now let's suppose that Apple need to make their website bigger. Let's call the new size b.
The amount by which the website has grown in size, g, is b - a.
If Apple were to keep the obsolete software on the website, they would now need to purchase g units of extra storage (whether that be off-site hosting, cloud storage, or hard disks - it's irrelevant, they would still need to get extra storage).
If Apple instead took the obsolete software off of the website, they would only need to purchase g - s units of extra storage.
Clearly, no matter what their hosting arrangements are, they are saving money.
But its such a ridiculously small amount, it is inconsequential
You started trying to do math, but you didn't continue. The iOS App Store, for instance, has 1.4 million apps with more than 75 billion downloads. In October, 2012, the average size of an iOS app was 23 megs, according to ABI Research. 1.4 million * 23 megs is about 32 terabytes. This estimate is on the low side because the average size of apps has increased over time, but let's just go with the data we have.
Apple's legacy downloads is less than 8 gigabytes. This is about one fiftieth of one percent, or about 1/4000 of the size of the storage used for the App Store just for iOS apps. It's also accessed and downloaded significantly less than apps or current updates, so it probably never in the history of Apple even got cached in the CDN - it probably always lived as a static directory on one of Apple's servers.
It doesn't really matter - there's no cost in leaving files on a fileserver. Nobody runs a server at 100% of disk capacity, so the amount of storage ends up just being a rounding error. Buy a 2 TB drive for a modest server and it'll cost 40 cents one time for the amount of space that those downloads would take.
I'll post something when I buy an SSL certificate for mac68k.org and the files are available there for download
So now that even Apple's given up on this old software, is it considered "abandonware"? I just wish they'd issue a statement that says it's OK to redistribute the likes of OS 7 and OS 8. With these multi-billion dollar lawsuits they're faced with on a daily basis, you really think they care about someone downloading 7.6.1?
They're not going to do that. Their lawyers would beat them silly for "giving away" intellectual property - whether they ever intend to use it again or not. That's why these things always seem to be a grey area. They probably don't really mind, but they cannot formally condone it. If pressed for an answer, they'd say "no". That's (for better or worse) the modern legal landscape - if you don't fight to control your IP, somebody else will exploit it and then you have less say because you didn't defend your ownership. The only way such companies could get away with it now is to pass it on to another small company, like a foundation they started. I think Sun did this with OpenSolaris before they were acquired by Oracle.
Small companies are more likely to be explicit in declaring things abandonware, because they aren't as beholden to investors and legal teams.
Small companies are more likely to be explicit in declaring things abandonware, because they aren't as beholden to investors and legal teams.
Something like system 7.6 not being available for free doesn't make sense, because apple cannot gain or lose any money by allowing it to be shared. I know theres more to it than just giving it away, but I really don't get it.
Abandonware isn't actually a legal concept.
If a company basically says, maybe by their actions and nothing explicit, that they don't give a crap about a product any more, then I think people should be able to do with it what they want. It would be like you taking something out of someone's bulk garbage and they complain, "Hey that's mine!". Yeh, but you were throwing it away, right?
We can argue back and forth about this concept until the cows come home. But it still isnt going to change the fact that its still a grey area until someone decides to take it to court and draft up laws governing it... (mostly bad, sometimes good).
"technically" software and technologies are proprietary and they are intellectual property. Since technically anyone never owned the software, you just leased/licensed/borrowed the use of it.
So apple still owns it. So until they relinquish their rights to the software, (sell it off or release it as freeware) its still theirs whether its in use or not.
"technically" software and technologies are proprietary and they are intellectual property. Since technically anyone never owned the software, you just leased/licensed/borrowed the use of it.
So apple still owns it. So until they relinquish their rights to the software, (sell it off or release it as freeware) its still theirs whether its in use or not.
Btw, someone managed to download the internet archive torrent ? :
https://archive.org/download/download.info.apple.com.2012.11/download.info.apple.com.2012.11_archive.torrent
Takes forever for me.
https://archive.org/download/download.info.apple.com.2012.11/download.info.apple.com.2012.11_archive.torrent
Takes forever for me.
No one ?
I did. IIRC, it took less than 3 hours to complete.
Thanks Renegade,
Will try again...
Will try again...
I cant remember if I downloaded it or not, if I did, i can probably either FTP or dropbox it, but over 7GB might be a bit hard.
It finally worked for me. Tried from another machine and it downloaded it 2-3 hours...
Thanks.
The archive is indeed 7 Gb compressed, and 12 gb unzipped.
Thanks.
The archive is indeed 7 Gb compressed, and 12 gb unzipped.
So we have mirrors of all the classic Mac OS updates, but what about Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.3 and contemporary software (like FCP 4.xx, for example)? Many of those updates seem to be very hard to find, if not impossible.
I'd like to gather every possible update to FCP 4.x.x, but I'm having trouble finding them.
c
I'd like to gather every possible update to FCP 4.x.x, but I'm having trouble finding them.
c
Wouldn't those still be available through Software Update? I know 10.4 and up are.