Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Nition 35 days ago
Nah, you just open source it in a broken state without anything that had separate licensing, so nobody is happy and the law is followed.
3 comments

This would be a way better outcome than the current default. I've even seen this suggested before [1].

If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Open-sourcing-video-games/ (See "What if I don’t completely own my game?")

Yes, partial source is still very useful. I don't think the law should allow for it though as companies could intentionally put as much as possible into "proprietary" libraries that they conveniently only license for binary distribution from a totally unrelated company that for no reason at all is owned by the same stakeholders. Much better to just require everything to be there and then have the industry adapt.
> so nobody is happy and the law is followed.

An outcome so common they invented a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance

This is already common with source releases for games and it is much much much better than no source release at all. A lot of the proprietary middle ware ends up being not that hard to replace after all.