As is usually the case with these open source reimplementations, the game assets (textures, sounds) must still be retrieved from the official installation / ISO.

While the owners of C&C made them available for free. Thus they can be legally downloaded, even directly from within OpenRA.

Cheers to those guys. I never understand the thought process of obstructing the use of materials that are so old in video-game-years. Without the community they (these assets) will just sit in the closet and die.

In most cases it is that various rights are held by defunct or disinterested parties and so it's near impossible to get relicensing done legally.

I can only speculate that some fear it might hurt the saleskf later editions and other new games (which is a bad reason)

And there seems to be some market for nostalgia around selling old games. We can see new versions of old consoles, bundles of old games (with preconfigured emulators), ...

You can get a copy on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/cnc-red-alert). I don't believe that this is copyright infringement. I think that we're just that old.

I can assure you, we are not that old. For works created in 1978 or later (which is the case for these) work-for-hire pieces like this get 95 years of copyright protection:

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.htm

So we are solidly inside the copyright window.

The entire player base will literally die from old age before the copyright expires.

Sounds reasonable.

The guitarist is Frank Klepacki and he has a bunch of additional albums, plus the RA/C&C OSTs exist out there in redbook form.