[fsloth]

Strongly disagree.

GitHub is among other things a platform for sharing.

Sharing should not be obligatory.

When someone shares something, if you like it, be grateful, and if you don't, just move along.

If you want to know how it's done just go and read some open source voxel library - there are ton's of them. If you are interested on the path rendering part there's lots of awesome didactic resources for that as well.

If you don't trust the author and are afraid that the code does something nasty - just don't use it.

If the author feels he is not contributing - or not willing to contribute - to the state of the art in voxel techniques or path rendering (both of which are totally fine stances) then there really is no value in showing the source.

If someone creates a free tool for making art, their contribution should be cherished, and their tool used for art, and appreciated for it's artistic merits. Don't give shit for the author for releasing the free tool on his own conditions. If you don't like those, move along. Or, if you are inspired, go make your own and open source it!

By the way, that discussion is just horrible. The author lays open the reasons why he does not want to release it and the other party just disagrees. "We could help you with the patches... I would like to read the code that I run".. Oh really? I wonder if he really has read through the entire codebase of the operating system and all of the drivers and all of the programs he runs.

"Helping out with the patches" without adult supervision can lead to this:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9491391/Elderly-woma...

I totally understand why the author would not like to nanny the internet's eager contributors. An open source project needs a huge cultural effort to collect and coordinate technically savvy key contributors before it can work. That won't happen automatically. Not everybody yearns to be a benevolent dictator for life of this or that.

[pawelmurias]

It'snot obligatory but it's still disappointing.

[fsloth]

Why is it disappointing? Sorry, I really don't understand and would like to.

[VikingCoder]

"disappointing: failing to fulfill someone's hopes or expectations."

I think you're viewing it from the "expectations" side, while binarycrusader, pawelmurias, and I are viewing it from the "hope" side.

If this were open source under a license that makes sense to us, I think all three of us were thinking we'd like to use the code to do other things. That's just a hope.

[pawelmurias]

If it's on github you kind of expect it to be an open source.

[pawelmurias]

Finding that it's not open source when you expect it to be (almost everything on github is open source). If you find something is worse then you expect it to be you get disappointed.

[fsloth]

Would it be better if you could read the sources? How do you know you could understand it? How do you know you could get it even to compile?

Sure, the binary is public, but that does not imply that the author has the codebase in any shape that would be legible or maintainable by anyone but him.

Sometimes projects grow so complex that only the original author can understand it. And there are lot of examples of projects that grew too complex even for their maintainers to understand.

What I'm getting at is this: making a code public does not make it usable, and cleaning up a research/hobby codebase so it's legible can be quite an effort, and not always possible.

Hence I find it odd to yearn for something you have no idea if it's worth yearning for. Unless one is an afficionado of masochism there are usually much more rewarding things to do than deobfuscate code someone else wrote.

[pawelmurias]

Most open source codebasesfor things that don't suck aren't trash (and if they are that would be a disappointment). Also I'm disappointment freeware things still exist.