I agree with your sentiment, but that is not the actual source. Try the actual original posting by Joss Whedon.

Source: http://whedonesque.com/comments/22240

Epic actually released ZZT as freeware some time back. Although I don't think they have it on their site anymore. Am I the only one really sad to go to epicgames.com and click Previous Releases only to find a list of Unreal games? I really wish the website could celebrate their rich history. It would be even more awesome if they provided the old shareware demos - or even made more of those games freeware since they aren't available anymore. Ah well. :-(

Agreed. I too used it to assess albums for purchase and am sad to see it is gone. I think the summary is biased even by Slashdot standards.

I'm not surprised to see it failed though, I'm surprised it lasted this long. (And I enjoyed the ability to trial music from them for as long as they lasted).

It was free. Not a store. Get your facts straight.

Agreed. I hated the buggy client, the DRM, the ads. Yet this news really saddens me.

I was willing to put up with them for the chance to legally try new music. If I heard a song by an artist that sounded interesting, my first step was always to see if Ruckus had them, download an album or two, and check them out. If I found myself booting up that crummy player over and over to listen to it more, I would go buy the CD.

In fact, the very crappiness of their software further incentivized me to actually buy the music sooner, since it was painful to use it all the time, and I couldn't put it on my mp3 player or play it in my car. But again, I liked that you could check the music out for free. I bought a lot of albums I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for Ruckus and this legal opportunity to 'try before you buy'.

This is the only case where one could justify DRM. Since the music is free, stripping the DRM amounts to piracy.

Before I got my graph-link (an absolute must-have for the budding calculator programmer) I was known to forego the use of a calculator on math tests that they made you clear your memory for! I didn't want to lose my precious programs that I had toiled long and hard on.

Although I too have completely re-done older programs from scratch for the sake of making them more efficient. Plus there was the point where I learned how to avoid memory leaks and never get Error: Memory when my programs were running.