Sorry - I meant if Activision wanted to release the source code for it now (or if anyone wanted them to) they wouldn't be able to work it out with Paramount. I imagine that most abandonware games die that way. You're right though - definitely was officially released, and highly popular. :) And then gone.

No doubt - which is tragic.
My two favorite computer games (by far) are Fighters Anthology (1997), and Star Trek: Armada (2000). Just absolutely phenomenal games. :)
But the first was abandoned when EA disbanded its military-simulation division ("Jane's"), and Armada was completely abandoned after a legal dispute between Activision and Paramount (one day, all the Armada-related materials on the website just disappeared).
On second thought, that's probably why games like Armada couldn't be officially released - too much of a copyright hurdle between Activision's code, and Paramount's art/storyline/characters/etc. But it's nice to dream that they could be; both Armada and Fighters Anthology still have active modding communities (and that's saying something with FA, which had no mod tools) a decade later. Imagine what people could do with the full sources. They're good games; it's a shame that they'll eventually just be forgotten and lost forever.
If I was a game developer, I'd want to snag a copy of all the source code just as a product finished, so I could share it around a decade later and see what happens.

Canada too - it really is interesting. Not a week after having won the election (where they campaigned on their economic responsibility and prowess), the Conservative government here released a number of reports showing that the state of the economy was far worse off than expected. Some say that they knew for a long time, and called a quick election* so they could be re-elected before people realized how bad things were.

The sad part is, I can't see any of our political parties *not* doing the same thing if they had been in power. Canadian democracy is a downer.

* It's pretty funny - while we've been watching the US election run-up for pretty much 3 years, we can pull off a Canadian election in a month and a week between announcement and election. All my friends here watched the US debates instead of the Canadian ones. : )