Rich Geldreich On The Concerns Of Open-Sourcing In The Game Industry

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Concerns Of Open-Sourcing In The Game Industry

Former Valve developer Rich Geldreich who was responsible for a lot of the Linux/OpenGL work at Valve in the earlier days of Linux gaming and who has also spent time at Unity, Microsoft, and other companies before starting his own consulting firm, has second thoughts about open-sourcing in the game industry...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OSS-Game-Industry-Concerns

[gutigone]

"The Concerns Of Open-Sourcing In The Game Industry"
...
Rich Geldreich about ONE project. Then using the classic "I've been talking to...who also agreed with me".

You've done clickbait before, but this is something else.

It's funny what you choose to pick, in this case the negative one, as opposed to the guys from the Unity game engine:

How many are who open sourced their work and are happy about it? Eg I open sourced our hlsl2glsl & glsl-optimizer stuff. It got used by direct competitors (Epic & bitsquid), as well as dozens of in-house tech stacks. I’m not sad about it at all though!

You're better than this, but that title is sooooo bad.

[Cyber Killer]

He just should have used GNU GPL and all would be good. His problem is not with sharing the code, but with permissive licensing.

[SWY1985]

I'm working on an open source game and all I get is praise and offers to send me donations (which I refuse because I don't need the money). If you're in it for the money, open source may not be the best thing, though there's a ton of companies that pulled off a succesful business model with open source.

[kaprikawn]

I'd be willing to bet that a lot of sales of Doom 1/2/3/Final and Quake 1-4 are due to people wanting the WAD files to use on implementations and updates of the respective open-source engine.

If Id open-sourced the engine that powered Rage, they'd see a spike in the sales of Rage, plus a residual sales tail that would last a long time.

[andrebrait]

To be honest, I never know what to think when it comes to open sourcing games and whatnot, specially if they're competitive in some way.

I mean, let's assume one open-sources Counter-Strike. I take the source code, modify it so it renders stuff transparent and compile it, and then I go to an online game. How would the server know in any way that I'm cheating? I can very well report that everything is fine if I change the source code of the anti-cheat system as well...

(I know there are ways of bypassing these things even though the software is closed-source, but I always wondered how it would be done if it was open-sourced).

Wouldn't I be able to report to the server whatever is that the server uses to know I'm not cheating? For example, let's suppose it's a hashing of sorts. I can just report the hash of the executable and whatnot from the normal file (open the normal file, replace it for the current one during calculation, send the hash, close it) and keep cheating.

I really have zero knowledge on how anti-cheat systems work, btw. I'm a competent developer, but I know nothing about this specially.

[mitch074]

I know there are ways of bypassing these things even though the software is closed-source, but I always wondered how it would be done if it was open-sourced.

Probably by allowing only signed binaries to connect to a server.

[shmerl]

So he is all for reinventing the wheel and not pooling resources? So '90s. No, open sourcing is clearly better than not open sourcing.

[aksdb]

So he basically thinks he threw away a lotto ticket just to realize he a would have won with it. Which in turn shows he simply had the wrong motivations for open sourcing his work. That is a valid reason to regret something. But it doesn't mean, that open source is a bad idea - as long as you know what you are doing.
He should look at it this way: he made a (significant?) footprint in the game industry and spared other developers a lot of pain. That is something to be proud of, not something to regret.

[andrebrait]

Probably by allowing only signed binaries to connect to a server.

Sometimes the solution is pretty obvious, yet I fail to see it. This is a no-brainer.
Now I feel dumb.