Freeoldies and Oldgames.nu ex-member right here. I used to dabble in all of it. I firmly believe abandonware (the true kind, aka unsold games) is morally ok. Sure it's legally not okay, but I really don't consider it theft. Hard to steal that which isn't even sold.
GOG is *the* solution to all this. Unsold games get a second chance, and are even easier to store away and keep than the original disks! Awesome. :D I think if a publisher has issues with abandonware folks they need to get on this and put their oldies here. I'd gladly buy them.

I have in moments searched for abandonware here and there, but usually the issue for me was also searching for patches and dosboxes and whatever random crap to just get the game to run right, which it'd still never run the same as originally intended.
I hope for this site that if I find an old game that I've been waiting forever to play again, I'd gladly pay the few bucks to download it to my computer and have it run right. I'd expect some glitches here and there, but right now am completely willing to support the site and see where it goes. Once they have Dune II and Tie Fighter I'll be more than happy,

Home of the Underdogs is my friend. :) I collect a lot of old games, and since many of my old computers don't work, and my current computer does not have a 5.25" drive I'm kind of screwed. So I went to HotUG and downloaded the games.
What I like about this place is the claim of making those old DOS games run on XP or Vista. Have you tried running the original Mechwarrior on anything faster than a 486? Its virtually impossible, and I do not like those programs that slow your computer down. I hope it will live up to its hype.
I hope we get a lot of the older DOS based games, so far I don't see any.

I've been into abandonware mainly as a way to relive games I played as a kid or ones that I wanted to but never could. A lot of the games I really want (QFG 4) aren't available via abandonware and I'd always love to pay for these games if I had the opportunity. Hence why I'm very excited about GOG!

Yes, I've been into Abandonware in the past although I've been into computer gaming for around 25 years now and I've kept pretty much all the original PC games disks I've ever bought (sadly not the manuals and packaging in most cases as a lot of the games are quite collectable on eBay now if they're in their original packaging).
I've also done a lot of downloading and hoarding of games and music in the past but I eventually just ditched all of the stuff and went out and bought only the stuff I really liked - by doing that, I discovered that I actually appreciated the games and music a lot more, plus a lot of the enjoyment comes from buying things legally as cheaply as possible and doing a lot of research before I buy anything these days.
I'll certainly be buying a few games from here - bearing in mind I'm in the UK where everything is expensive, $5.99 or $9.99 for a game is a small amount to pay - though I wouldn't touch the games here if they had any DRM built into them.

Yes, Abandonware... I was there when Home of the Underdogs launched. It was a sub-site of another abandonware site, sweet memories I was so happy when I found a way to replay all the oldies of yesteryear I had on 5.25" floppies (which are all busted today).
Now I've felt that abandonware wasn't really 'good', but for me it was the only way of getting hold of those games. And yes, I've since downloaded games which I didn't previously owned. And all of those that I liked I've tried to buy them whenever possible. Now I hope gog.com can help me with it. I've already purged some abandonwares from my PC in favor of gog-versions.

I remember those days. Falcon 3.0 and it's add ons were prime examples of trying to squeeze a just a couple more kb outta your boot up so they would run. (sigh)
Anybody remember OS2? :)
Home of the Underdogs, haven't been there in a while. Found a lot of old games I had lost there.

I can't remember exactly how and why I discovered abandonware, but it was during the Gangsters.org heyday. Through that I found Underdogs (which was hosted on several free webspaces like Xoom at the time), and stuck with the community there. With HotU being such a massive site, it was always easy to discover something new to try, especially at the edutainment section.
I like the idea of GOG and I hope it will work out. It's certainly good to see some entrepreneurship on this field of gaming as well, bringing the oldies up for grabs. Like with abandonware, it was never really about the price, it's all about availability.

Very... too bad HoTU isn't updated that much (I think). My current abandonware site of choice is Abandonia. Great games, and it's in some fifteen different languages.

I think abandonware was good, but only before any stupid pathetic kiddie came on the Interwebs whining because he wasn't able to play dos games without dos. After that everything changed. I love to see abandonware as a pre-Internet phenomenon gone rotten on-line.
In the past years I would have liked to kill google, sometimes :-)

Some.
NOW GET THE OLD SCHOOL NFS GAMES, GOG!

No quick question, it's four lengthy questions.
I currently own the domain name abandonwarering.com. People know me as Lone Lee back there. :)
What trend, abandonware or GoG? As most people here, I like old games. And for years abandonware has been and maybe is still the only effective way to get my hands on most classics here in Brasil (particularly DOS games).
What?
For me particularly that's a great question. I wish abandonware has always been like GoG, great sites, full support, documentation, a real community sense, access to the real zeroed full version ultra patched old games. I relied on abandonware for many many years but now, to it's pretty pointless to download a CD-rip version of Jagged alliance having the option to get the real deal for 10 bucks, with all the extras, even with the US$-R$ exchange being so unfavorable nowadays.

Into it? INTO IT??
I used a discussion of Abandonware games as part of my uni exam in Security, Privacy and Ethics! I was naturally arguing for it being no different than public domain stuff and that since there's noone losing out on income or prestige then there's no ethical issues with downloading it.
I went fairly shit in the exam, didn't answer enough questions correctly but I ended up getting a Credit for it so I have a feeling the marker might just have been a fellow retrogamer.

I dabbled in it for a bit but it wasn't an overarching thing with me. I used it as a diversion at times and for purposes of a historical nature.

I have to do an Extended Essay for my IB studies (I'm in high school), and we have to write it on anything we like that's not like porn and stuff. You know, normal people things. So I'm either doing it about the RIAA, Abandonware, or Creative Commons. What should it be?