> Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?

No, not at all. I myself am not a “the means is the end” kind of person. If I just wanted to puzzle out solutions with nothing to show for it, I’d do the crossword. But, in my experience, caring only about results leads to myopic short-term solutions that create bigger long-term problems. For instance, if you’re in pain, I can “cure” that by shooting you in the head. A quick positive result for getting rid of the pain—but at what cost? For thinking work, AI seems to be shaping up to be a lot closer to a bullet than an analgesic.

All I was saying is that human motivation does not exist in a single dichotomy, and that ecosystems that develop around mutual effort create benefits beyond the mutual goal. You can’t get all those benefits without humans doing the work, but there’s no extrinsic motivation for humans to do the work, so very few will bother, and the ecosystem dies. (I hope it wasn’t ‘load-bearing’.)

Anyway, the benefit of reconstructed source code is not even about preservation, it is in enhancing the user experience beyond mere preservation. We’ve been preserving software using emulation alone just fine for quite some time. If you are actually worried about preservation, you might consider how much the Wayback Machine is getting blocked these days because of AI scrapers. Or how an AI agent might apologetically wipe out some irreplaceable archive. Or how nobody in the future will probably be able to care about preservation much as the one-two punch of climate change and AI descend on us. It’s always those damned long-term consequences from short-term thinking, you know?