On this note, does anyone know where to legally obtain windows xp, hopefully for cheap ? I should note that I've tried at multiple places and none seemed fine so kindly speak from experience. (Or sell me your own, I'd trust anyone here).
Even if you paid anything for such an old product, your money wouldn't be going to MS anyway. Not sure what difference it makes, paying for an abandoned product.
Laws which make no sense and have no value to society should be ignored. If software is abandoned, it should be distributed freely.
Imagine you’re a subcontractor who wrote, for example, a PRNG driver, and licensed it to Microsoft so they can include it in Windows XP. Does the subcontractor lose their rights to the driver just because one of the OSes happened to become abandoned?
Why would those rights be tied to commercial value at all?