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In most cases - source available is _de facto_ open-source. You have two limitations on a product:
- "actual physical limitations": the fact that you have the source, and that it's not a brutally-difficult life/career-consuming endeavor to edit it.
- "artificial legal limitations": what the license says you can do Typically the capabilities afforded by the latter are a strict subset of the former (legal freedom to modify is useless without the practical freedom afforded by the actual source — I could release something with the full rights afforded by an open-source license, but if I fail to actually upload my code, even if you're legally free to edit the binary, it's a mostly useless freedom). At the same time, it's very common for the legal limitations to be utterly irrelevant, whether it's a case of you simply breaking a law that's not relevant to you (perhaps from another economic sphere of the world, or maybe you're just poor — or something is abandonware and there's nobody to even pay, not even a publisher). In all of these cases only the physical limitation dictates what you're able to do. -- If someone makes a freeware game, and it's abandonware — but it's source available, people can patch it so it keeps running on modern computers. They can translate it to other languages People can even fix egregious bugs. They can analyze it, and tease out internal mechanics and secrets, and document them on a wiki. If it's source-unavailable, then they're basically screwed. Far from being hypothetical, what I'm describing is more or less how the entire rom-hacking community works — thousands of games have undergone this, where they've received unofficial translations, balance and bug fixes, etc. (I have at least a couple of personal favorites, where I had an RPG with certain abilities that infamously did nothing in the release copy, even though they supposedly applied buffs to your heroes. In a modded version, that bug was fixed and they fully worked as intended.) All of this is possible in the modding scene because this stuff existed in a state where something "awfully close to" the platform's source code was available in a non-obfuscated, direct form. It's all illegal. All of it. That entire scene can't exist, legally, and survives on this wonderful, cockroach-like survivorship mentality of simply not caring that it's illegal, dodging lawsuits, and trading copies of things in defiance of takedown requests — which in turn happen so incredibly rarely that it may as well, practically, be legal. -- Unix, for another great example, basically exists because "actual physical limitations" didn't restrict it — the devs made the source available, tons of people copied it in what was probably a rather illegal/gray-area way, and sure, some people kicked up all sorts of legal fuss about it (c.f. some famous lawsuits involving SCO group), but in practice the only thing that matters was the fact that it had illegally achieved ubiquity. At that point the genie could no longer be put back in the bottle. |
And I dispute your claim that in the rom hacking community something "awfully close" to source code was often available. Plenty of times, mods are done using disassembly from the binaries. Disassembly is nothing like source code. Yet software patches based only on disassembly are possible, maybe even common. Source availability of course makes things easier. Documentation makes things easier still. Public version control of source code makes things eaven easier.