A question about the retired products for FS2004

[Herb_Dykeman 0]

I know you now longer sell these, but I was wondering if there was any plans to release the retired products as freeware and allow upload to sites like avsim or flightsim.com with the understanding that these products would be "As Is" and no longer supported.

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, Herb_Dykeman said:

I know you now longer sell these, but I was wondering if there was any plans to release the retired products as freeware and allow upload to sites like avsim or flightsim.com with the understanding that these products would be "As Is" and no longer supported.

I should think that's unlikely. It's not a case of developers being unwilling to do that, it's a case of being unable to do so, because they are (or were) licensed products, so I'm pretty sure they'd be giving away things which are not theirs to give away, i.e. a product containing liveries, logos, shapes etc, and as you know, there's a very prominent licensed product notice on most payware FS add-ons.

Not only that, whilst the PMDG FS2004 Boeing 737 NG is old, it's still a pretty good add-on and so it would in theory mean it was competing against their current NG and possibly affecting sales, since there are still quite a lot of FS2004 users who'd be able to get a fairly decent PMDG 737 NG for nothing as opposed to coughing up the cash for one. Granted this is a scenario which is hardly likely to put PMDG out of business, but it is nevertheless a possibility.

Back with all that copyright stuff, you can see an example of that legal malarkey on the Steam Edition of the Just Flight DC-3, which is now referred to as the 'McDonnell Douglas DC-3^TM' when sold on Steam (but not on the JF website itself), despite the fact that MD was founded in 1967, which was 17 years after production of the DC-3 ended! Which is a case of Steam making sure their butts are covered legally.