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Dealing with NIB software

Jackson

Jackson

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2015
Messages
349
Location
North Carolina
A new, completely unopened evaluation copy of Lotus Notes 4 has shown up in my collection. I absolutely have no use for this whatsoever, but I'm tempted to scan all the documents that are in there, including the covers. However, part of me wants to sell it and get it over with. The shrinkwrap is also tempting me to not mess with the box either.

What do I do?
 
I usually go by the value of the item. If it is something I bought or could sell for more than around $50 then I would hesitate to remove shrink wrap unless it was a title I felt very, very strongly should be "out there" for other to learn from and experience. But then again, I usually wouldn't buy something I wouldn't feel comfortable opening. If I buy something shrink-wrapped off of eBeh for $10 then other collectors had their chance to buy it or outbid me and I'm going to open it.

Of course, you could just set it aside for a while. I have a couple of items that I bought for cheap with the intention of opening but they have been sitting in a corner because they just look so pretty, like the eBay seller had reached back in time to 1984 and pulled the item directly off of a shelf. Meh, everyone else had their chance to bid on them. I'll get to them eventually.

I doubt any other collectors are going to cry over opening a copy of Lettuce Nodes 4. :p
 
Kazblox said:
A new, completely unopened evaluation copy of Lotus Notes 4 has shown up in my collection. I absolutely have no use for this whatsoever, but I'm tempted to scan all the documents that are in there, including the covers. However, part of me wants to sell it and get it over with. The shrinkwrap is also tempting me to not mess with the box either.

What do I do?
Click to expand...

I've bought a lot of software in boxes that came without shrink-wrap. Who's to know?
 
In the past few months I have bought 5 shrink wrapped boxes of terminal emulator software. Old enough that each fits on a couple of floppies.

I bought these to use them so of course I opened them up, although I used a razor blade to slice through the shrink wrap just enough along the edges necessary to open the box flaps and remove the contents, so that the box was still mostly shrink wrapped.

And of course I created images of the floppies before using them just in case they went bad later. One of the floppies had some unreadable sectors right out of the box. Fortunately it included both 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch sets and one of the sets was fine. I haven't uploaded the software anywhere because it was commercial software.
 
gslick said:
. . . of course I opened them up, although I used a razor blade to slice through the shrink wrap just enough along the edges necessary to open the box flaps and remove the contents. . .
Click to expand...

UHUH, another covert software operation . . . :cool:
 
Trixter said:
Shouldn't that be "archive the software, scan the docs, then flog it off"? I'd rather have software without docs, than docs without software...
Click to expand...

Depends on the complexity of the software and how popular it was. If it was copy protected and you can find images of it online I would rather have the original manuals. As stated even if the box is unopened you can have bad disks in the box.
 
gslick said:
I haven't uploaded the software anywhere because it was commercial software.
Click to expand...

If you'd like to ease your conscious ("this should be preserved") while simultaneously transferring the legal burden to someone else, you can upload the software to the internet archive at www.archive.org. They're a registered library in California and have received DMCA exemptions for archiving software.
 
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