Thanks for the dos version of Wing Commander 4, man you sure can convince EA even though they could've done it themselves. :)

seriously though why can't i do that and not call it abandonware? or copyright infringement

I guess their license to distribute the game always covered the DOS version was well, they just didn't have good clean copy to work with and package it from. I wouldn't be too surprised if all of EA didn't have one left lying around. That's the corporate world…

On another note, though, thank you GOG.com for updates like these, and despite the site's growth still caring about these little wishes from the small groups of retro gamers. It's part of the reason why I still love this site unconditionally =)

Adding my gratitude also..."EnforcerSunWoo", much appreciated, thank you!
Thank you also to GOG themselves, for adding the DOS version. Much appreciated!

My thought exactly. Although I'm always kinda surprised when I read this stuff about donated games and extra content. It's usually easy enough to find high quality downloads for these kinds of things online and one would think that it doesn't matter to GOG or their partner if their source is an original physical copy or a download hosted by a pirate site.

It makes sense to have a source that is guaranteed to be original, though, if only for verification. As GOG.com is going to resell the software, it would be a big liability to suddenly discover that they redistributed some undesirable code modifcation, too. On the other hand, I remember that there was a case where fragments of a scene NoCD were found in a GOG.com game, so I guess they do if they have no other option.