<i>If games become unprofitable, then who will program them in the first place?</i> --Harmless Pigeon

People who like writing games, probably. Look at Linux. Just a bunch of dorks who like to program, so they do. Who wrote this website? Who runs this message board?

So far as other software, in a computer ethics class I had to take, we discussed the possibility that writing software might be handled like medical and scientific research is handled today. That is, a lot of it is done by universities, or paid for by government grants. Computer science is a weird mix of science and industry, so it's hard to figure out where it should go; is it science? Is it industry? It produces "products", but computer programming is also a realm of mathematics. When you own a program, you really just own an algorithm, or a huge string of 1's and 0's. Computer programs and data can be easily copied because it's just "information", and information can be "copied", i.e. learned, by as many people as have access. But computer data is also something tangible and material, in the sense that computers produce music or games or video. It really is a mess, but computer science is literally still in its infancy. It'll all get worked out somehow, for better or worse.

BoB: I don't know. I think abandonware is what you call things that were never officially entered into the public domain, but that the company just stopped producing and they don't really care about it any longer.