Today I did some janitoring in my Web site repository, and found several pieces of old software. Things that I don't have time and/or interest in developing anymore.
Some items had no references from other site pages, so they were effectively unreachable, since search engines wouldn't find them.
It is a pity that some projects end up like this, but it happens. Priorities change, things that were cool or important become moot.
I kept this old software around because there is always a (very slim) chance of ressurecting some project, or, more probably, I could need a good example of working code.
In the past, I was not that cautious, and I regret that. I miss even some spreadsheets I did (the most regrettable loss of this kind was a subwoofer enclosure calculator). No matter how old or how obsolete technology they use, every software represents a huge amount of condensed knowledge, which is important to preserve.
Sometimes we are iconoclasts, we destroy things to bury the past or we "burn bridges" to show our commitment to the bright new future. Let's wipe that Java application because Python is the future! Ten years later, Android is on the news... (Personally, I have sworn off C++ three times in my life, only to become involved in some C++ project not much time later.)
Fortunately, it is easier to preserve software and memories nowadays. There are DVD-Rs and there is the "cloud". I put five "abandonware" projects in the cloud (Gitorious), and a sixth one was already available in Maemo.org.
Projects put in abandonware status are:
BSCALL: a Black-Scholes calculator for Maemo. It was developed for N800/N810. Repository is at https://garage.maemo.org/projects/bscall/.
PAIMORSE A Morse module for Python, with OS X and Linux audio backends. The CoreAudio and Linux backends actually generate audio in real time, they don't use that cheap volume on/off technique to play Morse. Repository is at https://gitorious.org/paimorse.
TARIFADOR: An Internet billing system. It is heavily based on "standard" Linux technologies like LAMP, iptables and scripts. But the core traffic sniffer, based in libpcap, is written in C++ for maximum performance. Actually, I sold several copies of this. Repository is at https://gitorious.org/tarifador.
LUCA: A general ledger software based on Turbogears. It is quite complete, and uses some program-generation techniques to avoid duplicated code. Too bad that the chosen Web framework is "out" nowadays... Repository is at https://gitorious.org/luca-ab.
JS-CL5: A small Javascript library inspired on Clipper 5 functions. Things like date manipulation were very easy to do in Clipper 5, and I always found them unnecessarily complicated in most modern languages. Repository is at https://gitorious.org/js-cl5.
Distributed computing examples: This code was meant to be used in classroom, so students could get quickly aquiainted with Sockets, Sun RPC etc. and use those examples as starting point for more complex services. Most comments are in Portuguese. Repository is at https://gitorious.org/prd-progs.