> GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR DISK.

It makes me remember some history - the absence of free and open source mentality in the hobbyist scene. All of these examples came from commercial games, which were meant to be sold commercially, and their hostility towards crackers is completely understandable and justified. But it was not limited to commercial programs, almost nothing was open source at that time.

An interesting historical fact everyone should be aware, is that before the popularization of the World Wide Web, there was a huge gap between the academic world of minicomputers, which brought us Unix, Internet, Usenet, 4.3 BSD, MIT-style hacking culture, free software movement; and the hobbyist world of microcomputers, which brought us CP/M, C64, BASIC, IBM PC, Amiga, BBS, Fidonet, Phreak/Whole Earth-style hacking culture (and some cracking), were essentially two completely different worlds in parallel. The division was largely caused by the fact that the formal world was inaccessible to ordinary people without special status.

The most striking thing was the absence of free and open source mentality in the hobbyist scene. There was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire world of BBS, and lots of helpful microcomputer communities, lot of system and development utilities, but almost nothing was open source. Many authors saw their programs as the work of personal dedication or an art, and believed no one but the author should be allowed to have control over the program development. Program source was sometimes released as "source-available" and the author may encourage improvements, there were also a lot of type-in programs, but most do not explicitly grant any rights of modification and redistribution (it's very problematic, only a few programs are generously relicensed under a free license or Public Domain, and today many other programs are still available online, often with source, but no 3rd-party hobbyist development at any scale is allowed due to its copyright status, they became effectively mere personal reading materials on the stone, and even as reading materials, the information you obtained by reading them is still somewhat toxic. And I heard the holding company of C64 KERNAL refuses to license the code to most community replica projects...). The community worked mainly by Golden Rule - in fact you can do many things based on those programs and code without authorization and licenses, as long as the original author is not offended, but almost nothing could be taken for granted! In today's world of GitHub, it was a virtually unimaginable time.

There were exceptions, and there were usually written by microcomputing enthusiasts with an academic background, e.g. Li-Chen Wang's Tiny BASIC had a copyright notice of "Copyleft, all wrongs reserved"; Ward Christensen's XModem was explicitly released to the public domain, and it became one of the most frequently-modified program in the entire history of microcomputer, and ultimately evolved into ZModem.

However, the free and open source philosophy remained largely unpopularized in the world of microcomputers, until Linus Torvalds' released Linux, an kernel written for a 386, under GPL, and when dial-up Internet access became more common. Only then, the city of hobbyists and the city of the academic became one, and the two strands of hacking culture fully merged.