Big codebases tend to contain licensed code or at least depend on it, so you'd get code that's either illegal to publish or contains huge gaps. Getting it in a state where you can put it on github, would require quite some dev and legal work, not likely to happen with abandonware.
It should be required to submit software sourcecode to the Library of Congress in order to claim Copyright. That would enrich the public domain. Aside from the fact that Copyright lifespan is absurdly long.
> The new version of TEX differs from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it.
Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails?
> Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails?
I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been touched for so long.
