John Carmack did a stellar job in that respect. Doom and Quake are still very much alive thanks to his decision.

Even he had some challenges with releasing Doom:

> The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows.

I would assume it's a lot more complicated today. Even the most simple programming projects tend to have a ton of dependencies nowadays.

And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

The secret sauce is more than a 10 year old engine.

> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones. And the code was released with a license that allowed commercial use.

> Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones.

Isn't that what we're getting from AI generated content?

Note, I'm not saying that a random person will create something better. I'm just saying there might be a risk of saturating the market if you can play 100 versions of the same game for free.

This isn't how the games industry works for games at thia scale (or any other media). They are events. Millions of people having the same experience at the same time and having a common cultural touch point.

The 100s of clones would be more like fanfic. A set of people would get very into them, search out the good ones (perhaps better than the original), or revel in the terrible ones. But then the whole community still comes together to watch the latest marvel film anyway.

The main effect would be to build and maintain the community for the next commercial version.

> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Maybe not, but we would have 100 other games that may have expanded the genre further.

> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

You are over appreciating the geek's willingness to toil on assets and make up a compelling storyline :)

Not that Ubisoft games are worth playing, but for a single player game at least it can be much worse.

Elder scrolls games are very moddable and people have made total conversions and map extensions. That didn't prevent the sales of newer TES games based on slightly improved engines and slightly better assets (fan-made assets are often still ahead of the official ones, but it takes years of refinement to get to that point).

That and things like Counter Strike / Day of Defeat that started as mods had a large number of maps back in the day. 99% of them were shit and weird experiments. The ones that did rise to the top eventually got incorporated into newer versions, and indeed became games in their own right.

DOTA as well, started as a mod for Warcraft 3 and eventually spawned a franchise.

Trying to capture ALL the value (in this case the game developer/publisher) is a mistake anyway. The healthiest game franchises have broad ecosystems around them. Releasing the source code of old games just encourages that.

If there is one set of games I wish were released it is Ambrosia Software's catalog. Of all their games the only one I can find that is open source is Maelstrom (It's the Escape Velocity series, I'd love to see opened).

dayz and the arma series aswell they would not have sold nearly the amount of copies without it, it also ended up as a standalone however controversial it might be.

For sure I bought like 5 copies of A2 for friends just so we could play DayZ mod together.

Ayyy, Day of Defeat was peak early 2000's FPS.

> If there is one set of games I wish were released it is Ambrosia Software's catalog.

And Chiral!

Man I'd love a Linux port of that game.

Escape Velocity was what got me into coding. I was huge into moding that game when I was younger on my old mac OS 7.x system. Absolutely fell in love with being able to extend the game.

Thanks for bringing that up. Those were good times. And agreed. Would love the source to original EV alone. Gonna take a gander at maelstrom! Thank you!

We walked a similar path. Fond memories of modding EV with ResEdit.

Before having an idea of how "proper" cracks should be done, EV copy protection was corrected in resedit by turning Cap'n Hector into an escape pod (so he couldn't kill you) and something else I forget right now to unlock some missions

I always wonder what happened with Ambrosia, they had a good library of games that they could update and could still sell but they just disappeared suddenly.

Updating and reselling their old games was the majority of their business for the last ~10 years of the company.

Their game library had some gems but they famously made most of their ga my es by ripping off other games. I’m guessing that didn’t scale.

Their biggest seller was a small Mac utility called Snapz Pro if memory serves.

They, frankly, were never a company run for anything other than milking a quick buck.

While not open source, I recently learned that you can still download windows versions of escape velocity in: https://escape-velocity.games/

That was one hell of a trip down the memory lane.

I didn't, though you can also play them on Infinite Mac.

Also if you haven't played Endless Sky, that's inspired by EV and open source.

This dynamic is conspicuously missing from modern gaming. I think the anti-moddability is one of the primary factors in the industry's enshittification. Maybe even worse than microtransactions.

There's no way I would have purchased Morrowind, if not for OpenMW.

Still waiting for them to release RAGE 1 source code.

> And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Releasing the old doom source code doesn't stop id software from making sequels all the way up to doom eternal.

Less commercially motivated uninspired follow ups and more original content seems like a huge win for culture at large. Large video game and movie studios are mostly churning out copy-pasted garbage nowadays.

Looping back to doom, here is a free library of doom mods.

https://freedoom.github.io/

According to Doom Eternal's wiki, it sold 3 million copies in spite of all these free to play doom games.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_Eternal

In the very short term, sure. All of the discussions of this kind of thing (and of copyrights and patents in general) have this same very-short-term perspective. "Patents SUCK, they're MEANT to encourage innovation but it's been SIX MONTHS and we STILL can't use [technique X]." Sure, but 20 years from now that patent will expire and we'll all be able to use it thanks to the fact that it was patented, and so significant parts of the 'secret sauce' are a matter of public record.

In the case of Doom, the engines being released has lead to an active community developing the engine (eg. GZdoom which can now be played in VR, with ray tracing, fancy shading, etc.) on pretty much any hardware with a processor.

Falcon 4.0 (1998) had a source code leak after Microprose went bankrupt and just like Doom it also had many community forks.

Its still alive and kicking today as Falcon BMS.

25 years and ultima online is still alive and kicking in the community shards.

Oh man, I remember building a new PC for Falcon 4.0. I think I still have the manual binder somewhere. I didn’t actually stick with it for that long in the end - I should check out what the community has done in the meantime!

They have added VR support. Crazy.

Absolutely, and those releases weren't even that old (<10 years).

There are so many things that I learnt from tinkering with the Quake 3 source code in 2007, I am still very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity at the time. My understanding of topics like real-time applications, AI, platform independent code and debugging would be very different if that code would not have been released.

Old engines are very far from the current way is doing things. You might learn a lot, but you won't learn what you need to program modern games

It‘s still interesting to see how certain challenges have been solved back in the day.

Or as a case study in what _not_ to do today. For example, Quake‘s ingame console commands were stored in a linked list. I believe looking up a command was a linear search through that list. You wouldn‘t do it like that today.

The example sounds like a quite basic insight into algorithmic complexity or complexity of lookup operation of data structures. A linked list is fine, if you need or want to go through the entries sequentially anyway, but if you need random access, then you probably want something different. I can tell that without ever having looked at something like Quake's console commands implementation. However, it might have been the case, that there were not that many commands anyway, so that the linked list did not noticably slow things down.

> it might have been the case, that there were not that many commands anyway, so that the linked list did not noticably slow things down.

Also, unlike the game code itself which has to finish running its work in time for every frame, it probably doesn’t matter if running a command from the Quake terminal takes a little bit extra time.

Would anyone notice or care about a difference in the amount of time it takes to run the /noclip command for example, in a O(n) vs O(1) lookup of the command in the probably short list of available commands? I don’t think so.

Speaking for myself, if I bring up the terminal in a game like quake to run a command, I’m probably standing stationary somewhere out of danger at the moment. And the amount of time I spend to tab open the terminal and type /noclip would be much greater than the amount that the game then takes to look for that command in its list of commands.

> Also, unlike the game code itself which has to finish running its work in time for every frame, it probably doesn’t matter if running a command from the Quake terminal takes a little bit extra time.

Except we did, because back then, the console command loop was part of the work done every frame - so your lookup still had to fit in the budget, or the player would see frames being skipped. Which, if memory serves me, happened as far as Quake 3.

Here's another important insight about how games were written back then: they were single-threaded. Rightfully or not, the cost of context switching was seen as too big, so everything was run in a single thread - maybe with an event loop (what kids these days call "async") thrown in for convenience, especially around UI. The games that did use threads, would use a small amount of them to offload some work that wasn't strictly frame-bound, or when outside main gameplay (e.g. in menu). I actually can't think of any game from that era, which would run multiple threads during main gameplay.

And sure, you can adapt the console with your linked list lookup to run on the event loop ("async"), so it would e.g. do a fixed number of search steps, then yield, and resume next frame. But the code for that would get much, much more complex than replacing a linked list with an array, even if you then also replaced linear scan with binary search.

So one other thing about games back then: things were much simpler, and skipping frames wasn't that big of a deal-breaker. Multiplayer wasn't so popular, there was nothing you could honestly call physics code - which would explode if you skipped frame without compensating, etc. And players were used to getting anything from 6 to 60 FPS, depending on hardware they owned. These days, a game console blocking main gameplay thread and causing frame skips, would be unthinkable.

Single threaded kind of makes sense for machines with single core CPUs. And multiplayer was usually limited because internet wasn’t that good typically being dialup.

Games required more cutting edge machines (maybe 2 years old) I remember getting a notebook with enough power (66mhz, 4 megs of ram) to place doom. Taking my machine to a friends and playing one on one death match over a serial cable.

But you were not typing a console command each frame didn't you? A spike of 0.X ms when you type a console command and hit enter won't be anything to worry about

i used it extensively and cannot think back on any time i thought the cmd line was slow

I don’t know about quake, but in quake 2 it consisted of a big list of:

    else if (strcmp(cmd, “somecmd”) == 0)
        somecmd()

I remember reading it at the time and being inspired by the simplicity of it. It didn’t need to be more complicated than it was, and so Carmack didn’t make it more complicated. That was in stark contrast to a lot of the object oriented c++ design stuff that I was also reading at the time.

So much of the quake 2 game source was like that. Beautifully straightforward code.

Linear time is fine for small n, and console commands aren't time critical anyway.

People famous for optimization also know where it matters. Optimization obscures.

Here it is:

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/372afde46e7defc9...

Does Quake 3 also use a linked list for the console commands? That game even has command completion, whereby pressing tab after typing a couple of characters, the console fills in the command you most likely wanted. The console in Q3A is extremely fast IME.

> For example, Quake‘s ingame console commands were stored in a linked list. I believe looking up a command was a linear search through that list. You wouldn‘t do it like that today.

Sure you would! You think those dinosaurs like Carmack didn't know about tree-like structures and hash tables back in the 90s? They did, it is just that (I assume) their main goal was to optimize something that is computed every frame, not once in a blue moon when player inputs a console command, which latency doesn't matter that much anyway whether is is 1ms or 10ms. In fact, toying with advanced data structures for console optimization sound like something junior engineer would get reprimanded for by seniors, if caught up wasting time on it.

The game studio I did did many many things in linked lists or arrays still because literally searching an array is still much much faster than computing out hash algorithm when the total number of entries is less than a thousand and it gives you memory predictability. So generally when you're searching it almost all of it has been loaded into RAM especially if you limit the size of the items in the length list which games almost always do and you list limit the size of the array which games almost always do almost everything in a good game engine is fixed size arrays for repeatable performance. I was surprised by this as well when I moved from doing Ruby and Java apps into AAA game studio but the engineers were kind and explained it to me and showed me the math and I was like yep that is way faster. I also didn't appreciate the things like cash coherence that they highly leveraged to make every frame sing

Intrusive lists are not bad. Building one does not require heap allocation unless the object itself is heap allocated. I can imagine this being case for a list of console commands, just a bunch of static allocated structs in various places tied together via intrusive list. In fact we (abother game company) are also how are doing it today as well

As for the linear search, it is just console commands. User types it and then it makes a search in what, a couple hundred entries at most? Sounds perfectly fine

Depends what part of game development you are referring to.

Game engine development? Sure.

Game development using engine? 99% didn't change.

Most of the old engines have been modernized. IoQuake3 for Open Arena, Doom3, even the Quake 1 src it's not the same as the one ID released. And I am not talking about DarkPlaces, but QuakeSpasm, SDLQuake...

I wonder how many people still program modern game engines? Sometimes it feels like everybody just take the newest release of the Unreal Engine and drops assets and scripts into it.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that there are no alternative engines, just that these things are so complex that there are very few people, who dare to compete with Unreal.

The "scripts" you talk about dropping into unreal engine are fully fledged c++ programs.

I guess this is legally unfeasible. Take a look at the splash screens next time you're loading a game - especially AAA but also smaller ones too. There will beone page with a bunch of logos. Havok physics is the one that comes to mind but there's loads more. Each of these is a plugin with proprietary code. They would need to be stripped out before the code could be released, which would probably be a lot of work. And then the code wouldn't run anyway.

This isn't a recent thing - as another comment points out, even the original Doom ran into this problem and only the Linux source was released.

It's often legally feasible but the result is difficult to get value out of (and obviously worthless for the company).

For instance Frictional open-sourced their HPL engine, Penumbra: Overture, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.

However the Amnesia games are built with Autodesk's FBX SDK, and I don't think they include any assets, they're not necessarily uninteresting artefacts but there's not much you can do with them either.

I'd be fine if they put up their code with the proprietary parts removed. They can just include a FIXME stating that the physics engine/video player etc. is missing. If the community picks up the code, they can just replace the missing parts.

Removing these proprietary parts can actually be a lot of work or potentially impossible without a major refractor, especially if they're foundational to gameplay, like a physics engine.

It can just “ERROR file physicslib.h not found”. Nobody says open source code must compile or work.

You need to remove all the calls to the SDK too.

Why is that?

Wouldn't the calling code be written (and thus copyrighted) by the company that wrote the game rather than the one that created the SDK?

Depends, if it’s code calling a console SDK API then you are bound by terms of the NDA to not publicly share it — forever. Even just function names!

More realistically, a drop of source code is basically painting a big target on your company to get sued by a troll. I’ve wanted to release my game’s source but am terrified of this.

Perhaps you could just rename the function names, structure fields, etc, to something different but similar?

e.g. instead of ps3_fly_up(...) you'd rename to something a bit more generic like sdk_float_up(...) or something like that.

It could require a bit of creativity and some work but with a sufficiently-intelligent IDE it'd just be a one-time rename per function name + structure name + field name.

A console game will have hundreds if not thousands of API calls, particularly in the io/gfx code

A good IDE can rename thousands of calls in a single command.

And all of the parameter types, e.g. btVector3 needs to become a new non-sdk specific name.

> It could require a bit of creativity and some work but <...>

Honestly, you can stop there. This is why it's not done - the value is small, it requires creativity and work and...

> just be a one-time rename per function name + structure name + field name.

https://sgringwe.com/2019/10/10/Please-just-stop-saying-just.... In this particular case "what about legal" pretty much stops the "just" dead in it's tracks.

> Depends, if it’s code calling a console SDK API then you are bound by terms of the NDA to not publicly share it — forever. Even just function names!

This is not true. API itself (function names and parameters) does not hold copyright. Otherwise you wouldn't have open-source applications on any proprietary OS, since they have the function calls of proprietary APIs inside.

What can be copyrighted are the header files itself: these you can't redistribute, as you can't redistribute the binary that is linked to the executable. Of course without these you wouldn't be able to compile and run the software, but you can reverse engineer the API from the function names and parameters and even the binary executable (because for an EU law reverse engineering for the purpose of substituting proprietary parts, that is this case, is allowed) and build a replacement for sure.

> What can be copyrighted are the header files itself: these you can't redistribute, as you can't redistribute the binary that is linked to the executable.

Note that while the exact header file is covered by copyright, the "information"/"facts" the header file describes (e.g. said function names, parameters, constants, etc) is not - at least as far as EU is concerned anyway (BTW the case you most likely have in mind wasn't for substituting proprietary parts but for interoperability between parts - i.e. it would still be valid for substituting one proprietary part with another proprietary part). This is also why different compilers for Windows have a "windows.h" (or language equivalent) with each having its own copyright but describing the exact same API.

(obviously this is for unsubstitutable fact-like information a header file contains and does not apply for any code like macros or inline methods like in C++ classes/templates)

> you are bound by terms of the NDA

> This is not true.

You usually have to follow contracts you sign.

Not where the law says such terms are unenforceable.

Surely that part of the code is AT LEAST fair use? Or one has to be at the wrong part of THAT historical argument (not necessarily pointing at parent)?

(Yes, I would argue that this is exempt following the ‘functional’ argument)

"Oracle would like to know your location."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America....

Absolutely untrue. It's legal to reimplement a third party API, as upheld by the highest courts in both the US and the EU.

So of course you don't need to remove your lines of source code which call into an API.

Probably true, but that is probably also against the license agreement (even if unenforcable). Most companies don't want to take this risk (and potential legal costs) just to release code that won't bring them any (direct) revenue.

That's not the same thing - one is redistributing the API (which is what we're talking about here) and the other is implementing an API.

To be clear we are talking about releasing code which calls into an API. Agreed you can't redistribute somebody else's SDK without permission.

To use bullet physics as a hypothetical example, if my game was the hello world example [0], I would expect that practically that entire file would be un-distributable.

[0] https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3/blob/master/example...

Why? You just ship the code that you wrote without the third part libraries. I don't think you did copy/paste the library code inside your own, it's probably linked to the executable in some form. Of course it would be impossible to compile the program without it, but as it's said, the component may be recreated by the open-source community, or sourced form the closed-source game in some other ways.

That's gojng to be a hell of a lot of effort, unless the third party libraries were abstracted out in the first place.

I've worked on games before. We ported our game to havock between versions. That took 8 months for one dev. The code review was 3 weeks. Ripping ours out was a month by itself. There were several libraries like that. The sound system was similar and we had to upgrade it every game which was similar work to havock. Heck there was a really simple font to bitmap lib/utility we used and that would have taken several months to replace. A month to rip out.

I moved us from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 for our debugging UI and literally just removing all the calls to the old debugging UI system was something like 2 weeks my only goal there was to get it to not compile. Wiring up all 3,900 debug UI connection points to the engine with access to all the rest of the game engine library and having written parts of both systems in the engine and the debugging library and the new UI library still took me almost 2 weeks I did it with both systems working at the same time which was actually easier than doing a full rip out. The studio I worked at tried really hard not to use proprietary libraries and it was a big deal for us using havoc but we needed to they ended up going back for the next title. They also wrapped literally every library with shims to make it easier to Port but things like physics engines are just basically impossible to wrap fully as our sound engines and font libraries the implementation details leak into everywhere.

The suggestion you're making is a very large amount of work probably on the level of several engineers for several years on a Triple-A title now you're talking like a million dollars for the company to open source it and locking up some good devs for a year or more. There's literally no economic trade off in doing that unless you can come up with a way to make one.

Porting would be an okay economic trade off there.

Thanks for taking your time to answer my suggestion in detail. I was just trying to suggest something very simple - just don't include the files that you don't have the rights to - so in your case just don't publish those font and physics library files. No need to completely rip out all references to it.

The resulting code will be broken, but if the community cares enough, they can fix it up.

I don't think this would be a huge effort to do - do you see any issues (legal or otherwise) with this approach?

We did have our code mostly sorted into 3p and 1p... However I'm not a lawyer and not sure how the taint might leak up. I forget where Google/oracle landed on apis being copyright but havock ids and other concepts leak into your code everywhere. Heck even proprietary details might or algos. It would still be hard and the lawyers would be skeptical. You'd need a business case besides goodwill to get over those humps.

I bet a ton of companies don't follow those best practices. And there's also the fact that you've now exposed yourself to litigation where some dev violated copyright of previous companies or libraries or whatever and put it in the wrong place or copied it. Before open sourcing you were fine. After you have essentially incriminated yourself.

The doom/quake case is kinda an exception. In that you likely (I'm guessing) had Carmack who is a founder/owner, deeply understand the tech base, understands cost and estimates, likely understands licensing quite well, able to go do the work, but also able to make the cost benefit tradeoff and override objections in some cases. That's not common in many companies.

I believe most popular libraries and middleware (like Havok) aren't freely available/leaked, OR at the very least it's some ancient version with massive API differences compared to newer versions. Around the time of the Pokemon leaks in 2020 I was watching people live on Discord struggling getting Pokemon Diamond to compile, because apparently the DS Wi-Fi component of the official SDK was never actually leaked online (at the time)

As an aside, have you played red alert lately. Holy crap. I tried a while back and it's like people have just been studying that game non stop since I was a kid. I got owned. But year totally agree.

I sort of think that with a smart OS license for game IP you could put a lot of stuff into the public domain and it would flourish in really interesting ways like fan fiction.

Same thing with Heroes III - they talk about “breaks” and chains and things on multiplayer and it just blows me away.

I though I was good at starcraft before going to Battlenet, and I though I learned I wasn't.

But last year I went to play HOMM3 online, and I imagined I could at least teach the kids a trick or two.

I was so wrong.

It's literally a completely different game from "normal" HOMM3 now, really.

It's interesting watching playthroughs, and seeing the tricks used, but it's not quite the game I played 20 years ago.

I did pick up some positioning tricks and tips.

You can take a look at Amazon Lumberyard which is free. It's based on CryEngine, which is behind Far Cry.

Crytek and Crysis, not Far Cry.

Edit: I stand corrected, it was Crytek and the CryEngine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry

Far Cry 2 starts to diverge from CryEngine roots with the introduction of Dunia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft#Dunia_Engine

Note that Lumberyard became "Open 3D Engine" (yes, very inspired name) which is Apache 2 licensed:

https://o3de.org/

https://github.com/o3de/o3de/

AFAIK all development in Lumberyard has ceased and moved to O3DE.

And O3DE is mostly a rewrite. It's really interesting to compare the last public CryEngine releases and O3DE for example how the rendering architecture is laid out.

> Maybe take game assets resize everything to 1/10th so that it looks like sht but can still be used as placeholder.

The assets are commonly licensed, so you can't include them at all, or in large parts. Commonly the game data is not part of the release either.

What should really happen is a law that video games get declared public domain and have their source code released after 10 years. All assets and dependencies would get automatically released under a license allowing for their use in that game and derivatives of it.

As it is, the source is mostly just lost to time, making humanity poorer.

There's a lot of games that have a shelf life of more than a decade. Maybe make that "10 years after the game is no longer sold".

That (maybe) would have worked in the olden days of physical disks or catridges. Today it is trivial to keep the game on steam with zero sales (or almost zero).

If lawmakers wanted to pass a law that actually made this happen they needed to stipulate a cut off date (and potential compensation) as well as rigid rules about what one can do with the released code.

> and potential compensation

Why would there be a need for compensation. Copyright is only granted in the first place so that more things will (eventually) enter the commons. Rolling back the perversion that is the current copyright terms doesn't need anything to balance it out since the current sitation is already so unbalanced in the other direction.

Very few and they still make 90+% of sales before then. A price worth paying

That dynamic has changed a lot with multiplayer games which are in continuous development. For instance DayZ just hit record player numbers after nearly a decade:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/11nlu70/recently_dayz...

But even if that's an outlier, online games can have a surprisingly long tail where the game remains profitable even if the player count doesn't grow anymore (as long as the developer supports the game at least).

Practically only games that are continuously updated have longer shelf lifes. In that case only the original version would have to be opened after 10 years and later modifications would have to wait ten years after their release.

Would be nice but remastering 10+ year old games is very profitable these days so I'd imagine that the industry would lobby very hard against it.

Doom, Quake and System Shock all have high profile remasters in spite of their source releases. Hell, one could argue they had high profile remasters because the source ports kept the game and communities alive.

Meanwhile, look at Unreal. Not even sold anymore.

In general, open-source all abandonware. Here's a few examples of non-game old software that would benefit the society if open-sourced:

Windows 9x and classic Mac OS. No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.

Flash Player. Adobe has stated in no uncertain terms that Flash is dead. Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem? I mean the Flash Player plugin and standalone app specifically, not the Flash authoring software — that's still alive under a new name, Adobe Animate.

Trident, the Internet Explorer engine. Again, it's dead for good as far as Microsoft is concerned, so why not release its sources for people to learn and hack on?

Presto, the Opera engine. This was leaked and of course I hoarded it, but it would be nice to see an official release.

Winamp. The company behind it pivoted to some kind of streaming social donation thing. It does not seem interested in maintaining the old Winamp app.

Path, the social media thing for "close friends", their mobile apps. The apps were insanely cool, especially at the time of Path's peak around 2013, but the service was shut down a few years ago. Unless they're going to somehow resurrect the service, there's no good reason for the sources for the apps to remain closed. I'd love to take a look at their implementation of real-time photo filters.

Thinking of it, it makes more sense for non-game apps than for games to release sources. Old games do sometimes come out as "remasters" for modern platforms. These usually reuse the engine and sometimes some of the assets. Non-game software, on the other hand, when it's dead, it's usually dead for good.

man I wish they had open sourced OS/2. It could have a linux sized community at this point.

Sadly microsoft had put so much of their code in it, that they didn't allow the release (according to my dad who worked for IBM and was even called "Mr. OS/2" because he had sold it so good to companies)

OS/2 is still in use and under active development, just under a different name.

https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/arcaos-os-2-updated-for-the-...

I remember reading somewhere that while the developers of ArcaOS have the rights to continue the development of OS/2, they didn't obtain the source code. So they have to patch their changes into the old OS/2 binaries instead of changing the code.

Is there a risk those closed source projects would be sued following the release because they disclosed some forgotten sin?

I'm thinking mostly of anti competitive practices from Windows.

There’s a bunch of costs to releasing closed source code as open source. Generally they’d have to have a team of developers review it, they’d need their lawyers to review it and any licenses. That every company that had licensed code used would also need to go through their own process.

At any time, one of them could say no and the process stops. So you’re basically paying for everyone’s time and possibly to relicense some parts. And im sure I’m missing other parts.

Yep, it's a huge time sink even in the best case scenario, let alone with ancient software encumbered by transfer of ownership through multiple corporate custodians.

It's not that unusual for it to not even be wholly owned by a single entity due to licensing requirements.

It's unfortunate that when a company DOES chose to release old software, the entire revision history is thrown out due to processes like that. In the software world, this probably doesn't matter too much, but video games can go through massive changes during development. But it also depends on factors like if game assets were even stored in version control in the first place.

It's not like this kind of stuff can't be found by reverse engineering. For Windows specifically, the ReactOS team is doing lots of it to document the inner workings of internal Windows APIs so they could reimplement them.

I doubt it. The Windows sources are available officially through Microsoft if you're spending enough money and your project requires them.

> anti competitive practices from Windows

You would more likely be amazed by all the dumb hacks in the system for backward compatibility, mostly for other companies' software.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...

It seems dumb and it is dumb, but it’s also an important feature of Windows that your terrible app from the 90s can still run today with minor changes generally. Less so if it’s win16 but anything win32 is good to go.

Also, Linux has a similar philosophy as Linus has eloquently described in the past. [1]

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

> It seems dumb and it is dumb, but it’s also an important feature of Windows that your terrible app from the 90s can still run today with minor changes generally.

This is a myth which is mostly not true from some time.

Can you explain how it’s not true? I’ve personally run software from the 90s. I am not a myth!

Windows 11 killed NTVDM and 16 bit support.

> Is there a risk those closed source projects would be sued following the release because they disclosed some forgotten sin?

I know nothing about law, but I guess software companies would protect themselves in advance by mandating that all their developers use only software and sources that belongs to them anyway. That would be useful in case of a lawsuit where a court could force them to show the sources to prove they don't come say from the claimant's reverse engineered software, or some other FOSS project. Things might be different with 3rd party modules and libraries, where an obscure module was licensed from a company that went out of business ages ago, but all their assets were acquired by another party who finds the module in the wild and decides to sue. Just speculating, but although I'm 100% in favor of FOSS, if the above were real possibilities, I couldn't but understand why some companies are so reluctant to release even old code they couldn't profit from anymore.

It's not that simple.

When developing software, a company might aquire a license to add some library or code to their product.

This happens all the time with OS's like Windows (licensing the ability to play media formats, etc.) or games (licensing certain engines or algorithms).

That doesn't mean the company squired a license to release the libraries or code as open source 20 years later.

So you'd have to go through the codebase with a fine-toothed comb, line-by-line, because the original developers don't work for you anymore, and the license agreements are long lost.

Releasing large software projects are a massive cost to any company that wants to be protected from potential lawsuits.

> Trident, the Internet Explorer engine.

Not really dead because it’s still shipped with enterprise Edge for sites that enable IE mode: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode

Also i think that people from Spyglass INC would not be very happy.

Doesn't HTA still use Trident also?

> classic Mac OS

I’d be really surprised if Apple still had the source code and custom tools necessary to actually build the thing.

they released the Lisa OS code (from 1983) recently, I think they still have all the Mac OS code

building it may be horrible, but the code would still be very interesting to hobbyists

There is a fair bit of third party code in the classic Mac OS, particularly in the extensions and cdevs. The nanokernel and some basic portions of the OS are likely releasable but they'd have to audit all of that.

> Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem?

I can think of lots of reasons. From a competitive point of view, you might risk having a big enough resurgence that it eats into the business of your replacement. From a technical point of view, it may reveal parts of the sausage making, or expose technology and libraries that you still use and rely on. From a legal point of view, it could open up multiple kinds of liability. From a support and staffing perspective, it typically takes at least a little time to open source something, if you want to do it well, there’s usually vetting & review by engineers and lawyers, and usually the need for more/better documentation than the internal docs.

Think about this from a business perspective- if they predict there’s going to be no financial upside, even indirectly, and there are costs and risks associated with it, then why would they? When companies open-source something, it’s not usually because the code is dead, it’s usually because the people in it are committed to open source and the org agrees to support that cause, or because the company stands to gain valuable attention from the community, and eventually or indirectly, profits.

We do have to support and celebrate when companies decide to release code, but we can’t really expect it or complain when they don’t, it just doesn’t make sense to them and they’re not obligated.

I'd guess something big as Windows 9x contains A LOT of licensed third party code which would be a nightmare to get permission for. Try finding five dozen rights holders after thirty years...

This is the usual argument you hear when it comes to old Games. It often would take way to long time to "clean" them up from 3rd party contributions/licenses etc. For a OS this is a impossible task.

Usually the argument goes that it would take time/money to rewrite the parts they don't have rights to, but simply deleting those parts and releasing the (now broken) code would be much better than nothing. Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place. Probably a bad assumption in the case of games particularly.

> Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place.

Not only that but for any large company to release code somebody in engineering needs to look at it to at least know what all is there, the legal department needs to assess the risk of potential liability, then which license to release it under needs to be decided. Finally, somebody in a senior business role needs to sign off on doing it.

I think it's great when old code gets released but the reason it's rare is it gets complex and it's nobody's job to do it. That's why many such release are thanks to an employee deciding to care about doing it and having the internal cred and sway to push it through. Or, as it appears in this case, someone who had access to the code and is awesome enough to choose to release it anonymously years later when the business is defunct or will no longer care.

This would all be a lot easier if copyright itself had more reasonable term lengths.

As far as I understand, this is even true of lesser known old movies - even the work of figuring out who has the rights to what is unlikely to pay back, so it’s just never released in a digital format.

This is almost exclusively usually due to either producer credits or music licensing.

For the former, if it's really that big they'll just release it and keep a standard budget aside for if/when the unlocated people come out. The latter is what really blocks movies because it actively costs them money, so they need to be able to earn more than what it is costing them to release. This makes music-heavy/niche music films much more expensive for potential broadcasters/streamers.

As a minor musician, I have to say I find the entire legal model around music to be effing ridiculous and more harmful to the art and society than the benefit justifies

It all disproportionately benefits big names and corporations while small time creators and performers get screwed.

The moment recordings came into play it all got screwed up.

Before recordings every musician made their living exclusively from performances and every musician copied each other constantly.

We lost so much with the advent of recording and the associated development of copyrights etc.

The proof is in the numbers: management and corps take the lion's share of revenues within the industry, with the actual musicians and creatives getting a paltry pittance.

don't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible.

The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

From memory they got their TCP/IP stack via the MIT licence

BSD license, because Berkeley was literally paid to port TCP/IP to Unix (and C) on basis that the resulting code would be available for incorporation by others free of charge.

Why would parents prevent publishing of source code?

Unless you mean that someone could see that you implemented their patent and retroactively go to sue them?

A license to use someone else's code doesn't necessarily include permission to publish the source.

A patent isn't permission to use their code, that would be a copyright.

A patent is a method, not an implementation.

We’re not talking about patents. Software licenses are about me allowing you to use code that I wrote, which is copyright.

Literally the person I initially responded to said:

> The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.

We are talking about patents because Wengo brought it up and I was asking how they are applicable here.

If the licensed code was written by a patent licensee, then to replicate it in-house you’d also need to license the patent yourself.

Their code for Zip folder compression/decompression is licensed from a 3rd party.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...

What is "NIH"? Google only mentions health institutions.

"Not invented here" syndrome

Not invented here.

We should just shorten copyright to get around that problem.

> No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.

Would add SGI's IRIX too!

Au contraire, Winamp 5.9.2 released recently and it's the same old player.

They are working on a new one that I am somewhat suspicious of, but Winamp 5.9 has been a pleasant surprise.

Internet Explorer is still very much alive for millions of people. Releasing the source would mean unlocking way more exploits on those people, with no plan to patch.

Winamp's source actually did leak a couple years ago too ("winamp-cvs")

> Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem?

Many reasons are there , it takes a lot of effort for a company to open source anything, to name a few

- Not get sued for IP infringement if your developer from 20 years back copied something or used GPL code etc

- Potentially expose active trade secrets , the program might not be sold , parts the code /algorithms whole modules might still be used in newer applications.

- Presence of PII or other sensitive/inflammatory content in comments and code, could be anything from funny(but inappropriate )method names to comments and documentation .

- poor boundaries, you could have dependencies which are used by the app which are not possible to also be open sourced.

- poor documentation, you simply no longer have all the code or is it time consuming to piece it all together

- expose vulnerabilities in your current offerings , code sometimes has way of being reused , you would be surprised how much “dead” code has a way of living on for decades later .

- third party agreements, not all your code is “your” code, you may have only licensed it from another vendor.

> In general, open-source all abandonware. Here's a few examples of non-game old software that would benefit the society if open-sourced:

That's not the heuristic companies use to determine whether or not to release source code.

> Windows 9x and classic Mac OS. No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.

The companies would not do that, for the very simply reason being that it would cannibalise their existing offerings if "people could [...] and run them on new hardware more easily."

The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7. The biggest competitor to Windows 12 will be Windows 11.

> The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7.

I have to wonder how relevant Microsoft will remain in the long run. There are several projects maturing that allow people to run Windows apps — the one reason people use Windows in the first place — without any Microsoft involvement whatsoever. The fact that Win32 API has barely changed over the last 15 years also helps.

Wine compatibility is getting ever better. ReactOS is aiming to reach beta quality "soon".

  the one reason people use Windows in the first place 

The other reason is UX and people's familiarity with it. I tried switching to ubuntu a few times but small inconveniences adds up eventually and at some point I don't see a reason to switch. Windows works just fine and I like its UX (however we will see if that will change with 11), Linux needs to provide a bit more for people like me to switch for their personal computers

Well, ReactOS is a reimplementation of most of Windows, including the shell and the kernel.

Anecdotally, I once installed Ubuntu + Wine for someone non-technical who broke several Windows installations by infecting them with ransomware. He used it for like half a year calling it "this strange Windows" because some people don't know what an operating system is. He eventually irreparably broke its file system because apparently he was shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running.

  shutting down his machine by pulling the plug while it was running

Well, if windows was more reliable when it comes to unexpected shutdowns then it is also partially linux's fault.

I have a similar experience as well. I have a pi server and I was trying to use an ntfs external hdd. For some reason it breaks the file system if I remove hdd or shutdown pi unexpectedly. I am not expecting there to be no data loss if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

When that happens, I connect hdd to Windows and it is able to repair it but there is no such option in ubuntu

> if i am not writing or editing a file, just doing nothing, then why FS breaks?

For a few reasons, but the most common is that when you write a file, you 'fwrite' operation doesn't typically immediately write blocks to the disk, instead it gets written to caches that will be written to disk in due course. Changes to the disk, tables with crucial data, etc again are just updated in memory, and written to the disk at a 'sensible' time. It's possible that you aren't actively performing operations to modify the disk, but various previous changes are sitting in memory waiting to be synced. If you kill the power then these changes aren't flushed so you can end up with corruption/filesystem problems. The main reason things work this way is for performance.

There's still money to be made with abandonware. GOG was buying and reselling dos games via slapping dosbox on it and making it playable.

Umm, anything windows can't be open sourced because significant parts are still in use and source access would create serious security issues due to how MS handles legacy components, right?

Windows 9x is based on DOS. The last release of that lineage was Windows ME. The only thing modern NT-based Windows has in common with it is many application-level APIs. Everything else is different. There may be some common code, but if that's so important to keep private, fine, strip it. Heck, release just the kernel of 9x, that definitely can't possibly share anything with any commercially-relevant products.

> source access would create serious security issues due to how MS handles legacy components, right?

Security through obscurity is not real security. It's just delaying the inevitable.

You've conflated being able to use legacy apps which require a very specific stack of components with the complete absence of any such components.

Additionally you've failed to recognize that where legacy code is maintained Exactly As Is (bugs included) because users (corps and gov mostly) explicitly depend on behaviors remaining exactly as they have been for 20 years, there is effectively zero means/will to fix dangerous problems which are not being actively exploited.

And the mantra around obscurity is too often misused and misunderstood:

It's not that obscurity is not a form of security it's that its not a meaningful form of security On Its Own.

Obscurity is in fact the first line of security.

Just like with physical security, the first step is in preventing attackers from knowing it exists at all and Then having security measures to prevent access/theft/etc if they do happen to find what is being protected.

Y'know, like safes behind paintings, which are a very real thing....

My own personal and private opinion is that I wish the legislation would opensource things that are not being actively sold where the owner is a corporation.

You still have registration in USA, so if you register then you have to deposit, if you register with corporate ownership then you pay a yearly renewal, if you stop paying the deposit goes to public domain. Simples.

And how much does that deposit need to be?

I guess the best way woul dbe to regulate that. If you want to sell any software (including firmware) you have to deposit the sources and encryption keys into some state-owned repository. If you decided to stop maintaining the code it would be released into public domain after some reasonable grace period (e.g. 5 years). That would solve many issues including excess e-waste.

The reason is often that those codebases are usually a giant hairball of closed source 3rd party dependencies which would be a nightmare to put under a common open source license, no matter if the companies behind those products still exist or not.

Often Open-Sourcing is not an option, as they license closed source code for it.

Windows for example couldn't be made open source because of licensed, closed source code blocks.

RIP UT2k4

I wonder if this reaches into the territory of “abandoning your copyright” though.

Agree. I would even be happy if the game was stripped of all licensed code/assets/tools/etc. And honestly, I don't even care if it can successfully compile/run. Just having the code alone would be tremendously useful for the purpose of study.

I think they won't as certain parts might have migrated to new engines without being changed much. Like geometry engine etc.

Maybe start a non-profit whose sole mission is to buy up this old IP and release it.

From a pure archiving point of view it would be great.

It's a shame how many pieces of software are already totally lost forever.