Proprietary Software: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
THE people who favour preservation of knowledge, access to old code etc. generally prefer Free software. Proprietary software has an entirely different mindset, revolving around business models rather than science. There's greater incentive to phase things out of existence and then sell new things, never stopping or even slowing down to consider the needs of "left-behind" users.
Proprietary software is the reason many sites are now offline. Many news sites simply ceased to exist, not just to publish new stories. Either they didn't want to renew the licence for software that ran their sites or the software they used became obsolete (complete abandonment, no exit plans). Then, extending the life of the underlying data (journalism) became too expensive or "unworthy of the cost". Society is worse off when revisionists take over.
The Web is still around because it was build on top of Free software. Its founder, Tim Berners-Lee, was inspired by GNU and the GPL (1980s). Of course today's Web is no longer free; look what Google has done with AMP and is still doing with WEI, DRM (EME) and so on. Proprietary software kills things. It kills works. Don't adopt proprietary things if you value information. █