> How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it.
I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.
Gone.
Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.
I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.
The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.
Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?
I worked for a company that built a really advanced TV DVR software stack, commissioned by a well know Linux distro company, could have been amazing. It was capable of handling combinations of TV playback and recording that would make any current solutions envious. But then said distro company decided they didn't want to get into the TV OS business, so they stopped the project when it was 75% complete.
Our company retained the right to use the source code. We pushed it, but some circumstances and some assholes stood in the way. The business started to struggle, we considered open sourcing it but the contract was complex and it would have been difficult to prepare the code to be open sourced. We didn't have the time and money to open source it and said distro company didn't want to pay us to do that.
Eventually the company was bought by some Russian company, the team laid off, the code was forgotten about and likely just illegitimately sits in a handful of ex-staff drives.
I feel it was a loss for the world that a huge effort never saw the light of day.
I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.
Gone.
Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.
I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.
The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.
Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?
It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.