[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah that's just the game logic which has been out since 1999. The rendering/networking/animation/UI/sound etc stuff is all still closed source (though apparently there is a leak from a Counter-Strike Online developer circulating among private hands - some code was contributed to Xash3D which perfectly implemented a non-trivial scripting system which was suspicious enough that it was removed).

[WorldMaker]

Isn't that because a lot of GoldSrc was idTech-derived enough that the legality of open sourcing it is trapped in contract law limbo? Even though those years of the idTech engine itself are now also open source, the contracts at the time did not plan for that and it is likely at this point that solving those contracts would be a 3-way legal question between Microsoft (ActiVision because of Vivendi/Sierra, Half-Life's original publisher), Microsoft (Bethesda because of inheriting idTech), and Valve, with the obviously problem in the way of that Valve and Microsoft have a complex history and aren't likely to want to get into a legal discussion if they can help it.

I seem to recall a fan project trying to take idTech's open source and recreate GoldSrc's fork from it by trying to reverse engineer from the parts of Half Life that are open source but not having much luck because the divergence was strong enough in some places to be somewhat impenetrable without some other Rosetta Stone.

[mewse-hn]

Maybe.. kind of.

The Doom source code was originally released under a non-commercial license that was weirdly restrictive and it was eventually re-released under GPL. The Quake source code was released under GPL from the beginning.

If Valve really wanted to release HL1/GoldSrc source code, they could re-base to the GPL quake source code and release their changes as GPL as well. This would be a miserable job because the remaining quake code is probably scattered across the codebase in weird orphaned fragments, but afaik it would be completely legal.

e: oh yeah if the shambling zombie that is Sierra still holds any rights over HL1 then god knows what the IP situation is with that property

[ndiddy]

They bought the HL1 rights back from Sierra in the early 2000s. The real problem is that the code is not in a distributable state and nobody at Valve feels like working on putting it into a distributable state ( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/1712#issuec... ):

> A while back Valve [had] a partner perforce server that had depots of the source files for both gold source and source that were shared with development partners and some mod teams. This server had a major meltdown and those depots were lost. At the time there was no requests and no activity around gold source development. Resources to rebuild the depots did not exist and still don't so that code is just not available. Once a year someone talks about maybe pulling it together to open source it but once again there are not resources to do the actual work need to package it up. The Sven Co-op team was luck in that there was a package and someone to make it available to them, that does not exist today.

[mepian]

Didn't Valve release a huge update to Half-Life in 2023 (i.e. 6 years after the linked comment was written)?

[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah they obviously still have the code. I think the important point there is server for partners - there is some things that licensees wouldn't get (uncompiled middlewares I'm guessing - they don't need to modify Bink/Miles/Havok etc).

[jamesfinlayson]

Maybe... although I think some non-id idTech 3 games have been open sourced since then.

[Fr0styMatt88]

There was also the very early leak/theft of the Half-Life 2 beta source (https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_2_leak)

[redox99]

What scripting system?

[jamesfinlayson]

The .seq files that Ritual introduced in Condition Zero Deleted Scenes.