It's not so much about being "hip", "cool" or a "loser" but for people like me, who maintain websites, and the people who run J2O it has everything to do with covering ourselves in a legal sense.

See, despite its age the Jazz Jackrabbit titles and franchise are still copyrighted and trademarked. This means that Epic Games or any remnants of previously related parties such as Orange Games, Project2 Interactive or Gathering of Developers can hound us or even drag us to court if we're doing something with their games that they don't like. Distributing the games is so far a very big no-no, as "abandonware" has no legal meaning in this case (Epic Games, the primary developer is still very much an active company and still holds the bulk of the rights to the titles) and unlike other Epic titles such as OMF 2097 none of the games have been declared free-to-distribute by the developers.

We keep on asking them though, more out of habit and a false hope, especially because it's such a popular franchise. And if only they would provide us with a legal alternative, such as selling the games through GoG or Steam, we wouldn't even have to deal with this mess!

Now Epic so far doesn't bat an eye to illegal distribution of the Jazz Jackrabbit video games. But neither did Sierra, when people made fan sequels to their King's Quest games. Then Sierra changed their minds and just like that all the hard work that went into making these fan sequels went up in smoke, with threats of legal action if fans pursued their endeavors. And that's the kind of risk we just don't want to run, after all the hard work we put into our sites and into the community.

Sure, "abandonware" will keep on existing and we're not here to stop it. We just don't want to get associated with it publicly, that's all. Besides other sites such as private torrent trackers and even Google will yield far better results if you know what you're looking for.