Can someone clarify something regarding allowed versus disallowed content?
Note: I am merely asking for clarification here (THIS IS NOT A REQUEST FOR ANY SOFTWARE)!
Quoth the Removed Content thread:
"DO NOT ASK FOR WINDOWS XP, WINDOWS XP SERIALS, OR SERIALS FOR CURRENTLY SOLD/NON-ABANDONWARE PRODUCTS. The old thread was chock full of Windows XP related inquiries and the devils own serial, among others, which is more than likely the reason for the DMCA as the thread was fine before moron kids involved XP.
ONCE AGAIN, WE WILL NOT BE OFFERING WINDOWS XP!
Windows XP needs to become truly abandonware before we can offer it. Despite the support ending in less than a month, it's still used by some ~30% of systems in the world. A product is not abandoned when it's used by 30% of the systems in the world! If you can not comprehend this, you will be shown the door. It will be several years further, if at all, before we offer XP."
and
"Okay, the general consensus within the abandonware community (us and other sites with the same goal) is to not carry software that is still widely used or supported."
and
"The purpose of Winworld is to preserve historical software that might otherwise disappear from the face of the earth, and act as an online museum so that others may learn about the past.
Windows XP is not rare or in danger of disappearing. Therefore it does not need to be here."
I'm asking for clarification because, while the above statements are true for almost all versions of XP, they are not true for the two versions of XP 64-Bit Edition (the Itanium one - NOT XP Pro x64!). XP 64-Bit Edition was never common to begin with (and I'm pretty sure it was never "widely used or supported"), stopped being sold in January 2005, and stopped receiving support somewhere between January and July 2005 (for perspective, Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows NT 4.0 Embedded reached end-of-support in July 2006, and Windows 2000 stayed supported until July 2010 - and all four of those are available here); it is now exceedingly rare (if anyone even still uses it at all), and very much "in danger of disappearing". For instance, whereas a quick Google search for "download windows 95 free" brought up three sites with download links in the first page of results, and "download windows 1.0" brought up one usable download site on the first page, no amount of Googling has been able to get me to even a single site offering download links to XP 64-Bit Edition that aren't actually misnamed downloads of XP Pro x64 Edition, and it's quite hard to even find information about it online nowadays.
Also, in the Removed Content thread, it's mentioned that Office 2000 was also removed due to the same DMCA that necessitated temporarily nuking the serials thread, and the MS Office downloads page specifies that Office 2000 Pro was removed; however, the rarer Office 2000 Developer Tools are still available for download, hence my wondering if something similar might be the case for Windows XP (i.e., most of the editions aren't kosher, but the very rare ones are).
Hence my asking for clarification. (Please don't hit me!)
Comments
I doubt Microsoft sees it the same way. The bottom line is they sent a DMCA demand for XP and Office 2000, so we are not risking adding anything newer.
Whatever those office tools were, they were already there, so we did not touch those.