These floppies won't be readable forever.

There's a level of moral obligation to do preservation.

The problem is that copyright laws were not designed to encourage historical preservation, at least not for computer software. Source code escrow should be a condition of copyright for closed source software.

Apple gave versions up to 7.5.3 for free on its page. Not libre, but there's Executor (a fork of it) under Github which can run System 6/7 binaries.

That’s not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the unreleased “Star Trek” project in which Apple ported System 7.1 to run on top of Novell DOS 7 (descendant of DR-DOS) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

We're talking about something else entirely.

But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

> But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

There is a leak of the System 7.1 source code floating around, although apparently it is missing some major components (such as the 68K emulator for PPC Macs)

Might need 7.1.2 for that.