If you feel the need to own the assets, you can get Quake 2 for $2.50 from Amazon. Though I suppose it's harder to be a curmudgeon about ID if you look for solutions like that.
I think it raises a valid observation of the role a site like The Pirate Bay actually plays in regards to preservation. When they did their little press stunt sending a letter to the King of Sweden [1], in part they said "We now have the honour to report that The Pirate Bay now archives 200 000, by the citizens donated, documents of culture and we're tracking more then 500 000 cultural treasures globally." They keep old stuff around. I have no idea where I would go dig up a Win95 disc (or stack of diskettes, for that matter), but I am fairly certain I could find it on TPB, and it would be seeded.
Beyond that, preservation of anything is an ongoing effort. Who is to say that copy on Amazon won't sell out? How do you know if it will even work when you get it. Some day physical media will go away, and you won't be able to read the CDs the game was pressed to. Git Hub will go away one day too. But moving the code to Git Hub represents a continued preservation effort on id's part, because previously this stuff was just hosted on id's FTP where no one could find it unless they knew to look for it. Being on Git Hub now makes it available to more people, for longer, should (god forbid) anything happen to id software.
So, despite the fact that his flame bait comment has been deleted, it raised some valid points about software and media preservation overall.
I agree about the archival nature of torrents, but I was reacting to the rude insistence that "only" giving away source code wasn't enough.
I hope that, in time, more credence will be given to the idea of "abandonware." Right now it's piracy of titles that publishers no longer care to protect, but I hope that some legislative body will enact limits on copyright based on availability. Though it's not particularly important in the grand scheme of things.
