[Ralfp]

The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-1/14084/6

[tempaccount420]

Why clean up first? Could be devs pushing back because they're ashamed (unnecessarily) of their code?

[cibyr]

We saw with Winamp how badly it can go (lots of license violations on vendored dependencies):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/winamp-really-whips-...

[account42]

Cleaning up in this context means figuring out what parts of the code they actually own and removing/replacing the parts they don't.