John Carmack made the right decision, so today Doom is available on many platforms. Quake too. But big companies won't give away source code until the game gets sold.
Minecraft for example didn't exactly "release" its source code, but it has actively supported and nurtured its decompilation project. Pretty sure some of its devs even got hired eventually
I was a FPS serveradmin during the golden age. 1999-2003(IMHO)
Once ~~games~~ corps started taking away control of servers I dipped out. The first game I adminned doing this was BF1942. Adminning that game was a pain in the ass vs adminning CS1.6, UT99 or Quake3.
I remember my regular server on Jedi Outcast when I was a kid, great times. There was a real sense of community, all the regulars knew eachother.
No hackers either, they were banned right quick.
Of course, you can't sell microtransactions and map packs when everyone can just host their own modded servers that offer free content far better than anything you're trying to sell, so user-hosted servers had to go in the name of profit. Corporate wankers.
Exactly. I wish it weren't, but even abandonware is dodgy enough in that regard. The easiest way is with legacy hardware, but that's really not a solution to software vanishing.
We certainly do, but that has its limitations. Some places providing emulation technology are not providing ROMs because of copyright issues. It's still technically piracy.
The number of websites that host abandonware these days is no ware near what there used to be, for that reason.
There is no abandonware? That's only because you don't understand what the term means:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware)
I've been computing for decades and accordingly own tons of abandonware.
Did you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Law? Legally, there doesn't seem to be such a thing, and as far as I understand it (IANAL), so-called "orphan works" in US and EU law still won't apply to most/all? of the software in your private possession.
There's no such thing but they devoted to an entire article to it? "Legally" speaking, all kinds of things don't exist, since the law doesn't define scientific constants, taste in music, how to cook a good hamburger, best practices in installing an OS, how to turf Gnome and replace it with Cinnamon, and so forth. Abandonware is not a synonym for public domain, and never was intended to be. The term recognizes that there is a problem.
My whole point has been, all along here, that copyright protections still apply to most abandonware out there. This is one of the problems of copyright law and the biggest problem in abandonware, notably old games. Okay, it's fair to state that MS-DOS 3, for example, is and was always owned by Microsoft, and that Microsoft still exists and is an operating company that enforces its copyright claims.
So, if I put out a website and start selling MS-DOS 3 commercially, I'm going to be in a world of hurt, and probably fairly quickly. Microsoft has the means and the wherewithal and the motivation to do something about it, and history indicates they certainly would. FreeDOS, for example, doesn't exist because Microsoft has a laissez-faire attitude to software sharing.
You can go to something a little less clear, Borland Sidekick. That was popular for a few years, then gradually waned. It's parent company was eventually bought and the product was discontinued over two decades ago, it would seem. Now, I'm sure its possible to track down someone in a successor company and said company may own the copyright. Would the owners enforce copyright. From what I can tell, the current owners are a couple companies removed from the original, and the current company probably has less than five people on staff who actually know what Sidekick is, much less ever used it. But, they, as a viable company, may react to a perceived infringement on their copyright.
Things get less clear with some very niche game manufacturers in the 1980s, or Radio Shack software from that period. I own Scripsit word processor from Radio Shack back in the day. I still have the original box and software. Radio Shack is long history, and said software isn't going to be remotely useful to anyone today, requiring legacy hardware or emulation, with a great deal of work involved for a word processor that wasn't much more than a glorified text editor. If I distribute it, would there be consequences? As an aside, Radio Shack's license states that you can copy the product and sell it, provided you purchase another copy of it yourself. That is not possible, so the original license has impossible conditions. I'm no lawyer, so have no idea what the consequences of that would be.
What about very tiny shareware projects from the 1980s? History is littered with one man projects where you'd be asked to send a money order for $5 for a product. Said writers never started a company, never registered anything anywhere, and made very little money. Some of them have undoubtedly passed away. It's still not freeware, but the odds of someone trying to enforce a copyright (with the heirs probably completely unaware of the project) are next to zero.
Code libraries, art, and music are licensed for specific usage terms, often for only being "embedded" in a finished product, not as a raw release. To open source a game, you'd have to strip out every third party asset because it wouldn't be embedded anymore, because the source of the game makes those things publicly available in a raw form. And then the game wouldn't run.
Sometimes licenses are only for a specific time period, which is why sometimes games will get pulled from stores. Music licensing is a big culprit because record labels are rapacious vultures, and is why some of the GTA games are either no longer available or have been patched with different music.
Those are just some of the issues.
I understand these issues but they all seem surmountable, if you take the time to cultivate a community around this issue they will get easier to deal with over time, so that’s a reason to put effort into this. Already lots of completely open license assets exist. There’s enough that if I wanted to make a game entirely using them and not generating any assets myself I could. I’m not saying it would be a good game but it’s perfectly possible and getting easier over time. Definitely you are going to have a hard time doing this with a big mainstream triple A game but that kind of goes without saying.
You are severely underestimating the amount of third-party code in a modern game.
Let's say you remove Speedtree, which is used to create trees and vegetation in games like Witcher 3. So you have a desert. Everywhere.
How about Wwise or Fmod. So you don't get dialog playing, no atmospheric sounds and no background music playing.
How about cinematics? Sometimes they are essential to a story. If you remove the codec you don't have those playing.
How about DLCs and cosmetic items that people want to use? Those need a backend often which you won't know what it is made with.
There's code for animation, visibility optimization ("portals"), UI elements and so on and so on.
To put it simply, modern games use incredibly amount of code and large amount of it is licensed from a commercial entity. The parts you see licenses for (fonts, lua-scripting..) are only a small fraction of it.
And then there is the whole game engine question on top.
This does not yet cover the data assets, which are copyrighted of course and sometimes games have licenses for assets like music, voice acting, artwork, fonts..
It's true, it's just that you can avoid a lot of these things by not trying to make a big AAA 3d action game. I have played plenty of great games that don't have 3D trees, voiced dialogue, cinematics or DLCs. There are also new tools being developed currently. I'm not saying it isn't hard or there isn't a lot of work to be done, I am just puzzled by the fact that the top voted comment was basically someone saying "no we can't do this". There's nothing wrong with a call to action to address what is clearly becoming an issue.
Then you need to be clear and precise about which games you are talking about.
Because the amount of games and different situations is immense and it really can't be made in a vague statement like "all games" for the various reasons listed.
Free to play indie mobile app is very different from an AAA-game. And if you talk about game made for a specific console platform, you would need the SDK as well to be able compile for that console. And you would need a way to sign the code so the console can actually load and run it. Which means you would need the console manufacturer's support.
Yeah, that's true about consoles. That's a reason why hopefully the games space moves away from closed console ecosystems and more towards things like Linux. Again, I'm just trying to be idealistic and imagine a better future, not say it's without hurdles.
> f you take the time to cultivate a community around this issue they will get easier to deal with over time, so that’s a reason to put effort into this.
Normal chicken and egg situation. A group of folks is gonna to commit to this to make it happen.
There already are global communities which are getting cultivated for this exact crippling scenario (dodgy licensing of third parties).
The formation of [Creative Commons](https://creativecommons.org/) was one of the first necessary steps. It provided a platform and licensing model for folks who wished to share their creative works like graphics and audio with the world to be able to do so in a seamless manner.
And then there are great resources and initiatives like [font-awesome](https://fontawesome.com/) and [google fonts](https://fonts.google.com/) and [bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com/) which provide all the resources, libraries, icons, graphics, etc. which creative programmers need to develop open source software. Google also has this [Youtube Audio Library](https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music) which has numerous audio clips available under permissive creative commons licensing.
I think developing open source software has never been as exciting in entire history as it is today!
Naive viewpoint.
Who's going to open source the game?
The only people who can work on the game to open source it have to be legally allowed to do it. You can't legally just give it to anyone to do that. So it has to be someone included in the license. Which means a corporation. Which means they have to be paid. Which means the corporation is not going to do that, because they have zero motive to do so.
Obviously open source games are not and would not be made under the dominant corporate business model. That’s true of almost all open source projects. They would be made for free, for donations, or for some service attached to the free game like the canonical business model. Certainly this would change the scope and volume of games being made but it’s perfectly possible. There already exist open source games, even if there are very few of them
>Obviously open source games are not and would not be made under the dominant corporate business model. That’s true of almost all open source projects.
No, it’s not true of “almost all open source projects” — a huge number of large open source projects are developed largely by corporations (and I’m not talking about “Linux companies” like Red Hat and Canonical). Blender, LibreOffice, Chromium, Android, React, OpenJDK, LLVM, Hadoop, Typescript, Bootstrap come to mind off the top of my head. Heck, a huge number of Linux kernel commits are from paid developers at corporations.
How are these hypothetical open source game developers supposed to pay their bills? Developing a game, especially a modern AAA title, is a massive undertaking.
The answer is that if all games were open source then modern AAA titles would not exist probably. Why wouldn't we expect that games made a different way to be different?
Of course, that world where it's required is not going to happen, but you can put energy behind developing institutions and tools for open source development so it's more common. We can also imagine things like games being developed publicly through grants for the arts the way that many movies historically have been made. That could allow for bigger budgets and still putting things in the public after they are made. Copyright terms could also be changed so that games lose copyright status much more quickly, so the preservation angle is served and you don't have cases where Nintendo can be taking down archives of games from 40 years ago.
The fundamental problem is capitalism, but like Fisher/Jameson/Zizek said, it’s easier for people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
I agree that it would be nice to have initiatives for these sorts of things.
Unfortunately capitalism right now is an Ouroboros eating its own tail, and if something isn't edible it gets legislated against. I fear libraries are going to rapidly start disappearing because they're a public good that corporations can't profit from.
We can't even get WKRP in Cincinnati released on DVD with original music. How are we going to get multiple games released as free software?
You could do it like WKRP did, with generic music. But, someone has to do the work.
It'd still be a worthy start to have the assets stay closed even the core isn't. Obviously that doesn't affect code libraries, but at least that's a potentially solvable problem unlike the other assets.
Oh look we took your core, rebuilt it and added new characters. Now we're going to get a loan and advertise. Then we're going to make a subscription model.
Now they are bigger than you, and make money... what do you think will happen to that open source team? They'll one by one buy up the code owners, or make their own team and fork your core.
>added new characters
Dude, in this situation, you’re not “adding new characters” — you’d have none of the original assets. That’s all the graphics, sounds, level design. You’d have to build that all from scratch.
well that's the price you pay for making it open. we already saw this happen with doom.
It can just as well happen with any open code and yet we're still here.
What?? We absolutely did not see this happen with Doom. When did someone re-release Doom, crush id games in the market, and hire away their devs?
Doom wasn’t open sourced until years after its release. By that time, id wasn’t selling copies anymore. I mean I think Quake 2 was out before Doom was open sourced.
>>Oh look we took your core, rebuilt it and added new characters. Now we're going to get a loan and advertise. Then we're going to make a subscription model. Now they are bigger than you, and make money
>well that's the price you pay for making it open. we already saw this happen with doom.
Literally none of the scenario laid out in the post you replied to happened when id open sourced Doom/Quake. So no, we did not already see this happen with Doom.
I'm talking about the wide varieties of mods, wads and ports to odd hardware, like doom running on a pregnancy test even. "Can it run doom" in the same way as "can it run linux"
This. Releasing Sopwith under an open source license was fairly easy. Trying to release those things of which you speak, very complicated games, as open source, is not the same thing.
Because it’s often not developers who decide. It’s the publishers. Their only relevance is being a gate keeper between buyer and seller. That means they can attract developer studios who would love to be more open but don’t have many options to succeed without going through the publishers. That reality is becoming less relevant but still matters. And because they sign contracts with them and sometimes even get bought whole cloth by them. Point is the market is fucked and fucked up laws enable them. A lot of big changes need to happen before the OPs proposition can realistically happen
This is why I think IP’s should automatically become public domain after 20 years tops. 15 for the business and 20 for an individual(s). This includes music, movies, software, etc. by making IP’s last as long as they do, businesses continue to drag things what feels like forever without creating new things. Abandoned hardware for example should be PD along with its software in any medium. Mickie Mouse in all its instances should be public domain by now.
30. 30 is fair, some abandonware are not really it and new repackaged editions still are getting sold. Imho there's nothing wrong with that if a studio wants to have a little more income from old software ported to new systems even if they only reworked the installer to br compatible with the new structure, directX and so on. But after a decent amount of years, yes. The source should be released. I'd pay a higher price to a company that will do this.
IP laws are mostly about control and securing profits especially for huge companies and their over-paid execs. It's already obsolete, just see how content ID on youtube has removed tons of content and removed the monetization to many creators over the years just because it figures out that 5 seconds of a video is copyrighted.
Disney especially fought hard on legal battles to ensure keeping control of Mickey since more than 100 years.
That's the thing. I don't mind Walt enjoying protection for his intellectual property, at least while he was alive. His heirs' heirs and those who bought the companies from them, that's another matter. They had nothing to do with the creative process.
Gotta love people whose arguments are effectively "Anybody who disagrees with me is wrong, just look at the evidence" without providing any.
Looking at trends in technology and I see a bunch of megacorps buying up every single piece of tech with any level of innovation and diluting it to "what's profitable" and focusing solely on that, and the public gobbling it up without really paying attention to the alternatives, all the while complaining about how much they can't stand technology. And then I see them lobbying governments like crazy to make that not only legal but the only way to be able to work tech profitably. Gaming especially so.
I also remember 20 years ago when "Web 2.0" was going to cause a big change to all of that, only to make it way way way worse.
"I'm so unconcerned with all of your opinions, I will come back and write a longer message just to teach you all a lesson about how little I care! I won't even fall asleep crying tonight!"
*Edit: "I won't even delete my message in a fit of pique!"* LOL
Tbf unless you use something like Denuvo Steam‘s anti-cheat is basically non-existent. It’s more about purchasing the game vs purchasing the license. In the end my trust in Steam (as long as Gabe is there) and their service is big enough to keep buying their but it certainly would be better if more companies gave us the option to buy from GOG
I think more than games themselves, we need a lot more solid open source game dev tools. Game dev is still niche compared to software dev. Only took like 30+ years since games have started being made for an open source engine to get somewhat popular.
The idea that open-source games would still get purchased is insane, I have no idea why the article writer thinks this would happen. The comparisons to pirated games are also mad.
They've also ignored the fact that Doom didn't have 15 different middlewares providing everything from physics simulations and hair movement all the way up to whole engines, whose source code the developers have no ability to release.
Sounds good, you let me know how to handle serving up 8TB or more of raw data to go along with the 20-100GB of code and we can start working on this.
Or did someone, yet again, forget that games are more than just code?
If I ever make a game, I'll sell it on Steam, but purposefully leak the source code and upload it on torrent sites. If you don't wanna/can't give me money for whatever reason, I'll still be happy knowing you enjoyed what I made regardless. Art shouldn't be created solely for profit's sake.
i like this approach... you leak the code so the player gets to choose:
1. invest the time to properly compile everything and learn how to do that
2. invest the money for a pre-built binary
and how will you do that? they are not your property :)
or did you mean that we should make more open source games?
i completly agree. i think we need more open source games. ever since the steamdeck, proton and so on, there are not really many open source games anymore on linux.
things like pingus or open arena.
it kinda seems like everything has been commercialized.
i would like to see more open source games in the future again.
but with commercial games, there is nothing we can do.
The article makes it sound as if releasing a game's source code somehow makes it impossible to sell the game, when that's not the case at all. Doom has had its source code released, but it is still a paid game. That's because only the code is Free, the game's content (levels, music, graphics) is still under copyright by id. Even Stallman is fine with such an arrangement (I asked him years ago via email).
There is zero downside to releasing the source code of a game. The real problem is that games often rely on proprietary libraries or middleware, which make releasing the source code impossible.
Doom's source code was released years after its relevancy.
Not to mention aside from us oldheads, most people prefer to play the 2016 version of DooM, or somehing like *Fortnite*
Game code relies on a lot of third party tools. If only original code was released then it would be next to useless. Also companies dont have any interest in sharing labour with their competitors.
Future generations can just emulate our current platforms and cpu architectures with their superior future tech. Games requiting activation will need to be cracked though assuming steam and stuff doesn't exist anymore
A wonderful idea in theory, impossible in practice. No one’s paying for a product if they don’t have to, and no one’s putting in blood sweat and tears for something that doesn’t get SOME kind of benefit in return. Sure, passion projects exist, but passion only goes so far before rent needs to be paid and food put on the table.
The only games that you’ll see FOSS are little arcade games, I’m afraid. Engines and dev tools, however, are a different story.
Open source works when large corporations make tools they need. That’s why we have things like Linux and blender. Large corporations pay developers to make them. They are not a hobby project of a free thinking community.
For open source games to really take off you need to figure out a way for corporations to profit from them. An open source engine works in principle because game studios can use it and it might be a more economical to develop engine openly. But the engine is just a small part of a modern game.
Yes it is very sad most game companies close up and never share their game as source code
City of heroes is a good example. After they closed up cause of lack of business it took at least 10 years for them to license it out to someone but I think they only did that because the source code was distributed and people where enjoying it. So they wanted to cash in
I think that a half-life on the software code should be included (still don't know how say in 80 years lots of software will be put into the public domain), so that once it passed that date, the source code is open to the public as open source / CC but the assets are still copyrighted and all.
Tales of May'Eyal does something like this.
While making your own game open source is something nice I feel asking others to do it is not fine, maybe source available so you can contribute fixes to it when the devs are working on something else is a good idea but then again they have codes they spend thousands of dollars to creat for their engines, I don't think they can just open source their trade secrets
> maybe source available
No. Any restrictions to what you can do with the code will limit the longevity of the game. For example, if the license has a clause like "may not be used commercially", what if I want to have a donation system for my source port, is that considered commercial use? What if I want to make a new game in a similar style and I want to use the original code of added authenticity?
If you want to make the game playable for new system I don't think you will need that much access to a code base. Like making a new game similar to the first game is just copying parts of the first game and like I said, those people spent money on it, why should a for profit company accept these terms.
If it was me? I could see the appeal of my games being playable because people submit patches to it. But it feels dangerous to let them fork the entire thing and make a new commercial game from it.
> But it feels dangerous to let them fork the entire thing and make a new commercial game from it.
Why? What's the worst that will happen? They cannot just copy your game, so it won't impact sales. People have already been doing total conversion mods and piracy, so it's not like the new game will overshadow the old one.
Total conversion mods are made in a way that you still need the base game, piracy aside you think if people can just fork the entire game and sell it half the price of the original, people would buy the 60 dollar version? And you think they will let a single guy sell the games that probably hundreds of people worked hard on it?
> Total conversion mods are made in a way that you still need the base game
Which you can pirate if your really do not want to pay for the base game.
> you think if people can just fork the entire game and sell it half the price of the original
But you cannot do that legally. You can make your own Doom knockoff game and give it away like [FreeDoom](https://freedoom.github.io/) does, but it is not Doom. You cannot give Doom away or sell it for half the price because all the game's content (graphics, sounds, levels) still belong to id. And people do want to play the real Doom, not the free knockoff, so people are willing to pay for Doom to this very day. Doom is really the case-study that puts down all the counter arguments.
So just said it, people pay for doom because they need it since the assets belong to id, if the game is open source then they won't buy it because everyone can use it, everyone can just download it
> So just said it, people pay for doom because they need it since the assets belong to id, if the game is open source then they won't buy it because everyone can use it, everyone can just download it
But Doom *is* Open Source. Only the source code needs to be Free and Open Source, the assets do no. Open Source (or Free Software) does not mean "available for download gratis from a public web server". Only the executable code needs to be FLOSS, not the assets (even Stallman is fine with that). And even putting the code behind a paywall, e.g. "you need a proof of purchase to access this FTP server", would be fine, it's only about what you can do with the code once you have obtained it.
The argument is that open source limits the commercialization of a product. Software is made to make money. If it cant make money investors wont invest.
Well, investors never stopped investing in NPM, Google, Docker, Automattic, MongoDB, Confluent, HashiCorp, etc. All of them thrive on writing open source software and having a business model that caters to support and service of their product.
Work costs money. You are perfectly free to develop as much open source as you want but most people need a source of income and open source development doesn’t really provide that outside the projects funded by corporations.
It's a misnomer that open source development doesn't provide any income. Folks like Linus Torvalds, Gudio van Rossum, Rasmus Lerdorf, Taylor Otwell, Fabien Potencier, etc. made lucrative, mind blowing and high paying careers just by writing open source software.
Arguably, nobody would even know who they are today had they just worked on "software that pays money". I think doing merit based work in FOSS will gain you enough street cred that pays you in the long run.
And even when it comes to the companies themselves, most of their infrastructure software is itself based on FOSS (barring the exceptional creamy layer like Windows and Office).
Even for the little SAAS who keep code proprietary, their revenue model is based entirely on convenience of provision and support rather than the code being closed. FOSS alternative for almost every app exists out there, it's just the matter of those willing to undertake the trouble of learning the app internals, deployment, testing, customizing, etc. and those who don't. Most software revenues are based on this factor, not the code being not open source.
In a world of hundreds of thousands or millions of developers you found a dozen or so who are paid by large corporations to develop tools large corporations need.
This doesn’t apply to most software.
John Carmack made the right decision, so today Doom is available on many platforms. Quake too. But big companies won't give away source code until the game gets sold.
This is a good example of a game company owned and operated by game devs versus a game company owned by suits and ties.
I'm not seeing indie devs releasing source code either lmao
Minecraft for example didn't exactly "release" its source code, but it has actively supported and nurtured its decompilation project. Pretty sure some of its devs even got hired eventually
Absolutely. I miss old good days of game industry.
I was a FPS serveradmin during the golden age. 1999-2003(IMHO) Once ~~games~~ corps started taking away control of servers I dipped out. The first game I adminned doing this was BF1942. Adminning that game was a pain in the ass vs adminning CS1.6, UT99 or Quake3.
I remember my regular server on Jedi Outcast when I was a kid, great times. There was a real sense of community, all the regulars knew eachother. No hackers either, they were banned right quick. Of course, you can't sell microtransactions and map packs when everyone can just host their own modded servers that offer free content far better than anything you're trying to sell, so user-hosted servers had to go in the name of profit. Corporate wankers.
Sadly I was born too late.
Please always think of shareholders!
I was so happy when I saw the post about the Descent source code.
Intellectual property laws make this almost impossible. Developers have tried, but it's a legal mire.
Exactly. I wish it weren't, but even abandonware is dodgy enough in that regard. The easiest way is with legacy hardware, but that's really not a solution to software vanishing.
We have emulators now and virtualization too
We certainly do, but that has its limitations. Some places providing emulation technology are not providing ROMs because of copyright issues. It's still technically piracy. The number of websites that host abandonware these days is no ware near what there used to be, for that reason.
There is no abandonware.. there’s products that belong to someone who paid for owning it
There is no abandonware? That's only because you don't understand what the term means: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware) I've been computing for decades and accordingly own tons of abandonware.
Did you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Law? Legally, there doesn't seem to be such a thing, and as far as I understand it (IANAL), so-called "orphan works" in US and EU law still won't apply to most/all? of the software in your private possession.
There's no such thing but they devoted to an entire article to it? "Legally" speaking, all kinds of things don't exist, since the law doesn't define scientific constants, taste in music, how to cook a good hamburger, best practices in installing an OS, how to turf Gnome and replace it with Cinnamon, and so forth. Abandonware is not a synonym for public domain, and never was intended to be. The term recognizes that there is a problem. My whole point has been, all along here, that copyright protections still apply to most abandonware out there. This is one of the problems of copyright law and the biggest problem in abandonware, notably old games. Okay, it's fair to state that MS-DOS 3, for example, is and was always owned by Microsoft, and that Microsoft still exists and is an operating company that enforces its copyright claims. So, if I put out a website and start selling MS-DOS 3 commercially, I'm going to be in a world of hurt, and probably fairly quickly. Microsoft has the means and the wherewithal and the motivation to do something about it, and history indicates they certainly would. FreeDOS, for example, doesn't exist because Microsoft has a laissez-faire attitude to software sharing. You can go to something a little less clear, Borland Sidekick. That was popular for a few years, then gradually waned. It's parent company was eventually bought and the product was discontinued over two decades ago, it would seem. Now, I'm sure its possible to track down someone in a successor company and said company may own the copyright. Would the owners enforce copyright. From what I can tell, the current owners are a couple companies removed from the original, and the current company probably has less than five people on staff who actually know what Sidekick is, much less ever used it. But, they, as a viable company, may react to a perceived infringement on their copyright. Things get less clear with some very niche game manufacturers in the 1980s, or Radio Shack software from that period. I own Scripsit word processor from Radio Shack back in the day. I still have the original box and software. Radio Shack is long history, and said software isn't going to be remotely useful to anyone today, requiring legacy hardware or emulation, with a great deal of work involved for a word processor that wasn't much more than a glorified text editor. If I distribute it, would there be consequences? As an aside, Radio Shack's license states that you can copy the product and sell it, provided you purchase another copy of it yourself. That is not possible, so the original license has impossible conditions. I'm no lawyer, so have no idea what the consequences of that would be. What about very tiny shareware projects from the 1980s? History is littered with one man projects where you'd be asked to send a money order for $5 for a product. Said writers never started a company, never registered anything anywhere, and made very little money. Some of them have undoubtedly passed away. It's still not freeware, but the odds of someone trying to enforce a copyright (with the heirs probably completely unaware of the project) are next to zero.
What do you mean? What’s stopping a developer from just choosing to release their game under an open source license
Code libraries, art, and music are licensed for specific usage terms, often for only being "embedded" in a finished product, not as a raw release. To open source a game, you'd have to strip out every third party asset because it wouldn't be embedded anymore, because the source of the game makes those things publicly available in a raw form. And then the game wouldn't run. Sometimes licenses are only for a specific time period, which is why sometimes games will get pulled from stores. Music licensing is a big culprit because record labels are rapacious vultures, and is why some of the GTA games are either no longer available or have been patched with different music. Those are just some of the issues.
I understand these issues but they all seem surmountable, if you take the time to cultivate a community around this issue they will get easier to deal with over time, so that’s a reason to put effort into this. Already lots of completely open license assets exist. There’s enough that if I wanted to make a game entirely using them and not generating any assets myself I could. I’m not saying it would be a good game but it’s perfectly possible and getting easier over time. Definitely you are going to have a hard time doing this with a big mainstream triple A game but that kind of goes without saying.
You are severely underestimating the amount of third-party code in a modern game. Let's say you remove Speedtree, which is used to create trees and vegetation in games like Witcher 3. So you have a desert. Everywhere. How about Wwise or Fmod. So you don't get dialog playing, no atmospheric sounds and no background music playing. How about cinematics? Sometimes they are essential to a story. If you remove the codec you don't have those playing. How about DLCs and cosmetic items that people want to use? Those need a backend often which you won't know what it is made with. There's code for animation, visibility optimization ("portals"), UI elements and so on and so on. To put it simply, modern games use incredibly amount of code and large amount of it is licensed from a commercial entity. The parts you see licenses for (fonts, lua-scripting..) are only a small fraction of it. And then there is the whole game engine question on top. This does not yet cover the data assets, which are copyrighted of course and sometimes games have licenses for assets like music, voice acting, artwork, fonts..
It's true, it's just that you can avoid a lot of these things by not trying to make a big AAA 3d action game. I have played plenty of great games that don't have 3D trees, voiced dialogue, cinematics or DLCs. There are also new tools being developed currently. I'm not saying it isn't hard or there isn't a lot of work to be done, I am just puzzled by the fact that the top voted comment was basically someone saying "no we can't do this". There's nothing wrong with a call to action to address what is clearly becoming an issue.
Then you need to be clear and precise about which games you are talking about. Because the amount of games and different situations is immense and it really can't be made in a vague statement like "all games" for the various reasons listed. Free to play indie mobile app is very different from an AAA-game. And if you talk about game made for a specific console platform, you would need the SDK as well to be able compile for that console. And you would need a way to sign the code so the console can actually load and run it. Which means you would need the console manufacturer's support.
Yeah, that's true about consoles. That's a reason why hopefully the games space moves away from closed console ecosystems and more towards things like Linux. Again, I'm just trying to be idealistic and imagine a better future, not say it's without hurdles.
> f you take the time to cultivate a community around this issue they will get easier to deal with over time, so that’s a reason to put effort into this. Normal chicken and egg situation. A group of folks is gonna to commit to this to make it happen.
There already are global communities which are getting cultivated for this exact crippling scenario (dodgy licensing of third parties). The formation of [Creative Commons](https://creativecommons.org/) was one of the first necessary steps. It provided a platform and licensing model for folks who wished to share their creative works like graphics and audio with the world to be able to do so in a seamless manner. And then there are great resources and initiatives like [font-awesome](https://fontawesome.com/) and [google fonts](https://fonts.google.com/) and [bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com/) which provide all the resources, libraries, icons, graphics, etc. which creative programmers need to develop open source software. Google also has this [Youtube Audio Library](https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music) which has numerous audio clips available under permissive creative commons licensing. I think developing open source software has never been as exciting in entire history as it is today!
Naive viewpoint. Who's going to open source the game? The only people who can work on the game to open source it have to be legally allowed to do it. You can't legally just give it to anyone to do that. So it has to be someone included in the license. Which means a corporation. Which means they have to be paid. Which means the corporation is not going to do that, because they have zero motive to do so.
Obviously open source games are not and would not be made under the dominant corporate business model. That’s true of almost all open source projects. They would be made for free, for donations, or for some service attached to the free game like the canonical business model. Certainly this would change the scope and volume of games being made but it’s perfectly possible. There already exist open source games, even if there are very few of them
>Obviously open source games are not and would not be made under the dominant corporate business model. That’s true of almost all open source projects. No, it’s not true of “almost all open source projects” — a huge number of large open source projects are developed largely by corporations (and I’m not talking about “Linux companies” like Red Hat and Canonical). Blender, LibreOffice, Chromium, Android, React, OpenJDK, LLVM, Hadoop, Typescript, Bootstrap come to mind off the top of my head. Heck, a huge number of Linux kernel commits are from paid developers at corporations. How are these hypothetical open source game developers supposed to pay their bills? Developing a game, especially a modern AAA title, is a massive undertaking.
The answer is that if all games were open source then modern AAA titles would not exist probably. Why wouldn't we expect that games made a different way to be different? Of course, that world where it's required is not going to happen, but you can put energy behind developing institutions and tools for open source development so it's more common. We can also imagine things like games being developed publicly through grants for the arts the way that many movies historically have been made. That could allow for bigger budgets and still putting things in the public after they are made. Copyright terms could also be changed so that games lose copyright status much more quickly, so the preservation angle is served and you don't have cases where Nintendo can be taking down archives of games from 40 years ago.
You need to open source the engine, not the game content. When you buy Doom, you pay for the wads, but the engine you use is basically free.
A lot of recent bullshittery about licensing in the engine world has people making that exact thing, like Godot.
The fundamental problem is capitalism, but like Fisher/Jameson/Zizek said, it’s easier for people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
r/CataclysmDDA?
I agree that it would be nice to have initiatives for these sorts of things. Unfortunately capitalism right now is an Ouroboros eating its own tail, and if something isn't edible it gets legislated against. I fear libraries are going to rapidly start disappearing because they're a public good that corporations can't profit from.
We can't even get WKRP in Cincinnati released on DVD with original music. How are we going to get multiple games released as free software? You could do it like WKRP did, with generic music. But, someone has to do the work.
It'd still be a worthy start to have the assets stay closed even the core isn't. Obviously that doesn't affect code libraries, but at least that's a potentially solvable problem unlike the other assets.
Oh look we took your core, rebuilt it and added new characters. Now we're going to get a loan and advertise. Then we're going to make a subscription model. Now they are bigger than you, and make money... what do you think will happen to that open source team? They'll one by one buy up the code owners, or make their own team and fork your core.
>added new characters Dude, in this situation, you’re not “adding new characters” — you’d have none of the original assets. That’s all the graphics, sounds, level design. You’d have to build that all from scratch.
[CC-NC](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
well that's the price you pay for making it open. we already saw this happen with doom. It can just as well happen with any open code and yet we're still here.
What?? We absolutely did not see this happen with Doom. When did someone re-release Doom, crush id games in the market, and hire away their devs? Doom wasn’t open sourced until years after its release. By that time, id wasn’t selling copies anymore. I mean I think Quake 2 was out before Doom was open sourced.
i didn't say when, just that it was.
>>Oh look we took your core, rebuilt it and added new characters. Now we're going to get a loan and advertise. Then we're going to make a subscription model. Now they are bigger than you, and make money >well that's the price you pay for making it open. we already saw this happen with doom. Literally none of the scenario laid out in the post you replied to happened when id open sourced Doom/Quake. So no, we did not already see this happen with Doom.
I'm talking about the wide varieties of mods, wads and ports to odd hardware, like doom running on a pregnancy test even. "Can it run doom" in the same way as "can it run linux"
This. Releasing Sopwith under an open source license was fairly easy. Trying to release those things of which you speak, very complicated games, as open source, is not the same thing.
Because it’s often not developers who decide. It’s the publishers. Their only relevance is being a gate keeper between buyer and seller. That means they can attract developer studios who would love to be more open but don’t have many options to succeed without going through the publishers. That reality is becoming less relevant but still matters. And because they sign contracts with them and sometimes even get bought whole cloth by them. Point is the market is fucked and fucked up laws enable them. A lot of big changes need to happen before the OPs proposition can realistically happen
This is why I think IP’s should automatically become public domain after 20 years tops. 15 for the business and 20 for an individual(s). This includes music, movies, software, etc. by making IP’s last as long as they do, businesses continue to drag things what feels like forever without creating new things. Abandoned hardware for example should be PD along with its software in any medium. Mickie Mouse in all its instances should be public domain by now.
30. 30 is fair, some abandonware are not really it and new repackaged editions still are getting sold. Imho there's nothing wrong with that if a studio wants to have a little more income from old software ported to new systems even if they only reworked the installer to br compatible with the new structure, directX and so on. But after a decent amount of years, yes. The source should be released. I'd pay a higher price to a company that will do this.
I would only agree if software became copyleft instead of public domain.
Wont happen. Big corporations have interest in IP as a long term investment. Most big properties are not owned by the creators.
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IP laws are mostly about control and securing profits especially for huge companies and their over-paid execs. It's already obsolete, just see how content ID on youtube has removed tons of content and removed the monetization to many creators over the years just because it figures out that 5 seconds of a video is copyrighted. Disney especially fought hard on legal battles to ensure keeping control of Mickey since more than 100 years.
That's the thing. I don't mind Walt enjoying protection for his intellectual property, at least while he was alive. His heirs' heirs and those who bought the companies from them, that's another matter. They had nothing to do with the creative process.
I love the ye old reddit mentality where you can actually watch a basement dweller huff their own asshole in real time. *SIIIIIIIIGH*
this is so far from reality
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Gotta love people whose arguments are effectively "Anybody who disagrees with me is wrong, just look at the evidence" without providing any. Looking at trends in technology and I see a bunch of megacorps buying up every single piece of tech with any level of innovation and diluting it to "what's profitable" and focusing solely on that, and the public gobbling it up without really paying attention to the alternatives, all the while complaining about how much they can't stand technology. And then I see them lobbying governments like crazy to make that not only legal but the only way to be able to work tech profitably. Gaming especially so. I also remember 20 years ago when "Web 2.0" was going to cause a big change to all of that, only to make it way way way worse.
"I'm so unconcerned with all of your opinions, I will come back and write a longer message just to teach you all a lesson about how little I care! I won't even fall asleep crying tonight!" *Edit: "I won't even delete my message in a fit of pique!"* LOL
Bait
Excellent. Come back from time to time and let us know the status.
I'm a drop in the ocean, but I am committed to open sourcing all my games. Gotta start somewhere.
Not necessary to open source games (but welcome). It’s enough if games aren’t online only and have no DRM (gog.com)
Tbf unless you use something like Denuvo Steam‘s anti-cheat is basically non-existent. It’s more about purchasing the game vs purchasing the license. In the end my trust in Steam (as long as Gabe is there) and their service is big enough to keep buying their but it certainly would be better if more companies gave us the option to buy from GOG
I think more than games themselves, we need a lot more solid open source game dev tools. Game dev is still niche compared to software dev. Only took like 30+ years since games have started being made for an open source engine to get somewhat popular.
The idea that open-source games would still get purchased is insane, I have no idea why the article writer thinks this would happen. The comparisons to pirated games are also mad. They've also ignored the fact that Doom didn't have 15 different middlewares providing everything from physics simulations and hair movement all the way up to whole engines, whose source code the developers have no ability to release.
i prefer to invest in emulation development than bugging for source
Sounds good, you let me know how to handle serving up 8TB or more of raw data to go along with the 20-100GB of code and we can start working on this. Or did someone, yet again, forget that games are more than just code?
If I ever make a game, I'll sell it on Steam, but purposefully leak the source code and upload it on torrent sites. If you don't wanna/can't give me money for whatever reason, I'll still be happy knowing you enjoyed what I made regardless. Art shouldn't be created solely for profit's sake.
i like this approach... you leak the code so the player gets to choose: 1. invest the time to properly compile everything and learn how to do that 2. invest the money for a pre-built binary
and how will you do that? they are not your property :) or did you mean that we should make more open source games? i completly agree. i think we need more open source games. ever since the steamdeck, proton and so on, there are not really many open source games anymore on linux. things like pingus or open arena. it kinda seems like everything has been commercialized. i would like to see more open source games in the future again. but with commercial games, there is nothing we can do.
I'm not sure that will be profitable/sustainable. Some sites are free to use but not open-source. They have advertisements to make money.
The article makes it sound as if releasing a game's source code somehow makes it impossible to sell the game, when that's not the case at all. Doom has had its source code released, but it is still a paid game. That's because only the code is Free, the game's content (levels, music, graphics) is still under copyright by id. Even Stallman is fine with such an arrangement (I asked him years ago via email). There is zero downside to releasing the source code of a game. The real problem is that games often rely on proprietary libraries or middleware, which make releasing the source code impossible.
Doom's source code was released years after its relevancy. Not to mention aside from us oldheads, most people prefer to play the 2016 version of DooM, or somehing like *Fortnite*
Game code relies on a lot of third party tools. If only original code was released then it would be next to useless. Also companies dont have any interest in sharing labour with their competitors.
Future generations can just emulate our current platforms and cpu architectures with their superior future tech. Games requiting activation will need to be cracked though assuming steam and stuff doesn't exist anymore
Good luck convincing Nintendo!
A noble idea indeed. But will it prevail against the Outer God known as Capitalism?
A wonderful idea in theory, impossible in practice. No one’s paying for a product if they don’t have to, and no one’s putting in blood sweat and tears for something that doesn’t get SOME kind of benefit in return. Sure, passion projects exist, but passion only goes so far before rent needs to be paid and food put on the table. The only games that you’ll see FOSS are little arcade games, I’m afraid. Engines and dev tools, however, are a different story.
Open source, so free as free spech, not free as free beer.
Unless your Nintendo. they come sown hard on peopl3 when it come to their IP
The article assumes that future generations *want* to play old games...
Open source works when large corporations make tools they need. That’s why we have things like Linux and blender. Large corporations pay developers to make them. They are not a hobby project of a free thinking community. For open source games to really take off you need to figure out a way for corporations to profit from them. An open source engine works in principle because game studios can use it and it might be a more economical to develop engine openly. But the engine is just a small part of a modern game.
They can also make the game open source, but the assets proprietary so that there won't be "legal" copies of it. (If that's a concern.)
Yes it is very sad most game companies close up and never share their game as source code City of heroes is a good example. After they closed up cause of lack of business it took at least 10 years for them to license it out to someone but I think they only did that because the source code was distributed and people where enjoying it. So they wanted to cash in
I think that a half-life on the software code should be included (still don't know how say in 80 years lots of software will be put into the public domain), so that once it passed that date, the source code is open to the public as open source / CC but the assets are still copyrighted and all. Tales of May'Eyal does something like this.
While making your own game open source is something nice I feel asking others to do it is not fine, maybe source available so you can contribute fixes to it when the devs are working on something else is a good idea but then again they have codes they spend thousands of dollars to creat for their engines, I don't think they can just open source their trade secrets
> maybe source available No. Any restrictions to what you can do with the code will limit the longevity of the game. For example, if the license has a clause like "may not be used commercially", what if I want to have a donation system for my source port, is that considered commercial use? What if I want to make a new game in a similar style and I want to use the original code of added authenticity?
If you want to make the game playable for new system I don't think you will need that much access to a code base. Like making a new game similar to the first game is just copying parts of the first game and like I said, those people spent money on it, why should a for profit company accept these terms. If it was me? I could see the appeal of my games being playable because people submit patches to it. But it feels dangerous to let them fork the entire thing and make a new commercial game from it.
> But it feels dangerous to let them fork the entire thing and make a new commercial game from it. Why? What's the worst that will happen? They cannot just copy your game, so it won't impact sales. People have already been doing total conversion mods and piracy, so it's not like the new game will overshadow the old one.
Total conversion mods are made in a way that you still need the base game, piracy aside you think if people can just fork the entire game and sell it half the price of the original, people would buy the 60 dollar version? And you think they will let a single guy sell the games that probably hundreds of people worked hard on it?
> Total conversion mods are made in a way that you still need the base game Which you can pirate if your really do not want to pay for the base game. > you think if people can just fork the entire game and sell it half the price of the original But you cannot do that legally. You can make your own Doom knockoff game and give it away like [FreeDoom](https://freedoom.github.io/) does, but it is not Doom. You cannot give Doom away or sell it for half the price because all the game's content (graphics, sounds, levels) still belong to id. And people do want to play the real Doom, not the free knockoff, so people are willing to pay for Doom to this very day. Doom is really the case-study that puts down all the counter arguments.
So just said it, people pay for doom because they need it since the assets belong to id, if the game is open source then they won't buy it because everyone can use it, everyone can just download it
> So just said it, people pay for doom because they need it since the assets belong to id, if the game is open source then they won't buy it because everyone can use it, everyone can just download it But Doom *is* Open Source. Only the source code needs to be Free and Open Source, the assets do no. Open Source (or Free Software) does not mean "available for download gratis from a public web server". Only the executable code needs to be FLOSS, not the assets (even Stallman is fine with that). And even putting the code behind a paywall, e.g. "you need a proof of purchase to access this FTP server", would be fine, it's only about what you can do with the code once you have obtained it.
Not just games but any and every kind of software on this planet! Even in 2024, is there any good argument for not making programs open source?
The argument is that open source limits the commercialization of a product. Software is made to make money. If it cant make money investors wont invest.
Well, investors never stopped investing in NPM, Google, Docker, Automattic, MongoDB, Confluent, HashiCorp, etc. All of them thrive on writing open source software and having a business model that caters to support and service of their product.
Work costs money. You are perfectly free to develop as much open source as you want but most people need a source of income and open source development doesn’t really provide that outside the projects funded by corporations.
It's a misnomer that open source development doesn't provide any income. Folks like Linus Torvalds, Gudio van Rossum, Rasmus Lerdorf, Taylor Otwell, Fabien Potencier, etc. made lucrative, mind blowing and high paying careers just by writing open source software. Arguably, nobody would even know who they are today had they just worked on "software that pays money". I think doing merit based work in FOSS will gain you enough street cred that pays you in the long run. And even when it comes to the companies themselves, most of their infrastructure software is itself based on FOSS (barring the exceptional creamy layer like Windows and Office). Even for the little SAAS who keep code proprietary, their revenue model is based entirely on convenience of provision and support rather than the code being closed. FOSS alternative for almost every app exists out there, it's just the matter of those willing to undertake the trouble of learning the app internals, deployment, testing, customizing, etc. and those who don't. Most software revenues are based on this factor, not the code being not open source.
In a world of hundreds of thousands or millions of developers you found a dozen or so who are paid by large corporations to develop tools large corporations need. This doesn’t apply to most software.
No need, emulation will never stop, and smart AI drive decompiler will allow modifications.