Rather than going on about backwards compatibility, has anyone given any thought to forward compatibility? Will these games work under Windows 7, or whatever else might happen on the PC?
There is something to be said for making the original game files available.

This is something kinda off-topic, but I've been wondering about this too. One of the disadvantages of the closed-source model that games have historically employed is that you can't really modify the original game binaries to run on newer systems, you can only wrap it in some kind of compatibility layer, or reverse-engineer the game engine, or write a new engine from scratch.
Eventually, operating systems will have changed so much that the only way to play Windows games will be some kind of compatibility layer like WINE, or by third-party reimplementation.

My bet: very likely, because Steve Ballmer himself has said that Seven will be some sort of "Vista 2.0". And if the games are Vista-compatible....
Looking further... well, my bet, again :P : DOSBox will be able to emulate Windows. For now it's able to "run" Windows '95 only....

Look at the virtual machine OS X implements for older software use; also, look at virtualization and think about the fact that we now have enough resources to use it to emulate an older OS. Taking these things into consideration I think that it's a non-issue the fact that software is closed-source because there will always be methods of running it without too much trouble.
You missed an interesting discussion today on IRC about the old software used by companies and old programming language. It could of been relevant to this discussion.

Yes, that's true, I forgot about VM's.

I second this idea. It'd be nice to give DOSbox a bit more exposure, too. More exposure -> more possible donations -> better DOS emulation for everyone.

Still, don't the VM's still need the original Operating Systems? I for one don't have any of my older OS's as they went with my old PC's to who ever bought them. If I do the same in few years when I buy a Windows 7 (I fully intend to skip rubish they call Vista) computer to replace my current one I won't have old OS to run in VM and can't get one either (well used one's but still...). MS could include VM run XP for backward compatibily in Windows 7 but there's likely no change of MS doing something that intelligent.

Yes, you need the OS in order to run that VM so this may lead to a stop for some people; the other option would be to volunteer code, time and/or money to projects dedicated to providing a layer of compatibility (such as DOSBox, Wine etc.) in order for them to evolve faster.
No major developer will release the source code right after the project launch but one can hope that they will learn something from id and the model they adopted (releasing the source code for Q3 for example years after the game launch).

>> I for one don't have any of my older OS's
If so, I can't possibly understand why complaining for old OSes compatibility :P

I'm not we're complaining about backward compatibility or rather their lack of it. If I'm to migrate to new OS, I expect my old programs to work at least as well as they did in my previous OS/PC.
As you're pointing specially my lack of old OS's; well I can't sell my old computers without an OS can I? Or rather I can but very few people would be willing to buy just the hardware. Only reason for me to posses an OS from an old PC would be that one of my old PCs would have fried itself but even then I'd probably just install the OS from my old PC to the new one I would then have to buy.

That is not the software developers fault but the OS writers; look at OS X (yes, I'm getting bored of giving it as an example but that's just it is) and the step they took when moving from 9 to 10 and now dismissing the PPC architecture. They provided compatibility layers (be they VMs etc.) to make sure that the old apps (or most of them) would still work.
On the other hand you can't expect a piece of software to have infinite shelf-life because most of the gamers nowdays aren't interested in games from 10 years ago so it isn't viable neither for the game company to re-port it (money spent on a product that won't return the investment) nor for the OS (they're games, gamers play what's new... we aren't talking about business apps here).
So the whole point of this discussion is sort of invalid because of the points mentioned above and by others in previous posts.
Edit: Also, your old programs that worked on your previous OS will work unless they do either a stupid version check (that programmer should be shot) or the OS changes it's architecture in a solid way (if so they will for sure use a VM to provide previous gen software support).
If you're talking about programs that stopped working when you switched from 98 to XP or even from DOS to 98 then you can't really expect them to work in Vista or Windows 7 or whatever.

I've been lucky with my retro games so far as almost all what I've played have worked in all versions of OS's Ive had (95, 95SR2, 98 and XP) with little to no problems. I won't be getting Vista however as some of them most likely (have been reported) won't work. It also gives me headache when I have to help people with my family with their problems with Vista (I can't even find many things that were click away in XP. Same reason I hate Office 2007 at least as much now that I've seen it. Won't touch that one either even with 10 foot pole :p).

hahah, thanks for the laugh
EDIT:
what some people don't realize, is that with windows many programs work because they're technically exploiting holes within the system. new iterations either fix this issue, or are built on a different archetecture so those old exploits don't work anymore, meaning the program doesn't generally work. It's best to treat each 'new' os as a 'different' os and assume the compatibility is the same as if switching from mac to linux, to windows. You're either going to need a Virtualization program or a separate install of the old OS. One of the things people didn't understand about Vista is that because they dumped a bunch of linux code, it simply wasn't just an update to windows XP but a completely different operating system all together.

>> If I'm to migrate to new OS, I expect my old programs to work at least as well as they did in my previous OS/PC.
Well, this is not Linux, but Microsoft / DOS / WIndows so I think your expectations are highly exaggerated XD
And the GOG.com games, in the end, aren't "old" games at all but "reconditioned" ones....