Maybe it's illegal, however since neither the author(s) nor the publisher are suffering from its use, so there's nothing unethical about it. On the other hand, this allows people to get more mileage from older hardware, thereby creating more values for the society and reducing waste, which is A Good Thing.
Some people may argue that, abandonware allows some people to gain access to older programs so they don't have to buy newer versions of the same programs, thus causing monetary damages to the copyright owners. There are a number of flaws to this argument:
[*]This certainly doesn't apply to games, since newer versions of games aren't simply upgrades or, er, bugfixs, but entirely new programs based on the same theme or idea (e.g. MOO 2, Warlords 2 and 3). Sometimes the new versions are created by different teams (e.g. MOO 3) or even published by a different company (e.g. Railroad Tycoon 2).[*]The new versions usually have steeper hardware requirements and don't work on older hardware.[*]This allows people who have programs on damaged media recover programs they own.[*]This allows people who have programs on very old media (5 1/2" diskettes, for example) but without the proper drives access to programs they own. I am not even sure if you can buy a 5 1/2" drive these days.[/list]
Aabandonware certainly provide a valuable service to the society at large.
