• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 10th, 2024

help-circle
  • Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

    Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

    All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.



  • I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

    So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.