Having an escrow in a structure like the library of congress (or the NSA, they have tons of storage /s) and they get released when company dies or the product isn't commercialised for more than x years. Or when the company decides to.

Maybe it is a bit more complicated with assets rights, that's what a couple game devs told me.

Dan Geer (CISO at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s private investment arm) gave a BlackHat talk that advocated for this, among other things.

https://youtube.com/watch?si=8txvgqH6mqerinkZ&v=nT-TGvYOBpI&...

Something about the CIA and NSA having access to a large library of commercial source code makes me feel uneasy from a privacy perspective. It's like inviting the neighborhood robbers over for dinner.

I wonder if there's a way to implement this without storing the code with a central authority, e.g. by encrypting the code so that it can only be decrypted in X years. You'd probably still have to have a central authority involved to ensure people can't just fast-forward - but a system similar to TOTP codes could be a neat mechanism!

I don't think we have any way to do that. Time is abstract for algorithms. Unless you make something you know you couldn't solve in less than x years. But that assumes you can predict improvements in algorithms and computing power over a long period which could be tricky to get precisely.

You use reflective solar bodies X/2 light years away and blast them with highly redundant encrypted data such that in X years Earth will be on the receiving end of the reflected transmission.

3.3 gigs of just text source code? That is unfathomable to me.

EDIT: Okay, I guess if it also include revision control then that makes more sense. Still, that is huge.

lots of binaries are in there. it's ~16GB decompressed

What's the actual size of just a single version?

I’m reminded of the time when a Reddit user bought a random box of Blizzard things on eBay and ended up finding a StarCraft gold master source code CD. Many people suggested sharing the code, but Blizzard lawyers reached out. Blizzard eventually gave them a bunch of swag after they returned it.

Would have been so interesting to see.

https://mashable.com/article/starcraft-source-disc

What's a gold master source code CD? Source code wouldn't be in the gold master... The gold master is the final version intended to be pressed to retail disks.

Also:

"The disc in question allegedly contains the source code to the original StarCraft game that GameSpot reported as being lost back in 2000 -- it forced Blizzard to start from scratch on its massively popular real-time strategy game."

What does this mean? StarCraft came out in 1998. Also losing one copy doesn't mean you lose all the other copies. And I can't find this supposed article from 2000. I have so many questions...

It probably means “version of the source code used to build the gold master”.

Some places have (or had) a business process of escrowing both the release and the source used to build it. Escrowing just the source used to build the release can require significantly less storage than escrowing the whole version control system. It also avoids the problem “we have the entire revision history, but we aren’t sure which commit was used to build these binaries”

If you lose everything-a colleague told me the story of a company whose offices were in WTC, luckily all the staff got out alive on 9/11, but they forgot to make offsite backups of the source code-the source code to the release(s) shipped to customers is most important, because you need it to make patches. The rest of the revision history, while valuable, is less essential.

Presumably the source code for the gold master - “Gold Master Source Code” was written on the disk itself. The Imgur link is no more, but you can still see a preview image of it in the original Reddit post. Judging from the comments, it also sounds like the OP may have looked through the contents on a live stream and confirmed it was source code.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/640iem/foun...

> The Imgur link is no more, but you can still see a preview image of it in the original Reddit post.

Here it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20170505105616/https://imgur.com...

what a sad story!

Those lawyers must have had a laugh there and then. Money? Nah, let’s see if they go with toys and clothing from the warehouse.

Publishing it would be breaking the law and exposing themselves to a lawsuit, which they would lose. The swag is nice.

Who said anything about publishing. Just give it to a friend who might share it with peers

Now in addition to copyright violation you’re part of a conspiracy

Well there's two arguments to be made. They 100% gave him the source code in a grab bag of goodies. That's a pretty simple case of he has a right to the disc itself, so he could have just kept it (or resold it) and not published. Them giving him "stuff" was them "buying" the item back, not just them being nice (as you put it).

There's also an argument to be made that the code itself does not infringe on their IP, as this was the lost source code from the old edition of StarCraft (from how I'm reading it in the news). Losing this code specifically made Blizzard restart the project, so it's not even the same project nor a commercially released product.

The former argument is pretty black and white. The latter very tenuous.

> There's also an argument to be made that the code itself does not infringe on their IP,

That’s not how IP works.

Blizzard didn’t forfeit their rights to the IP at any point. Even selling them a grab bag of stuff that unintentionally included a copy of the source code doesn’t mean the recipient actually received a legal license to the IP.

You can make all the arguments you want, but in the court of law you’re not going to get away with anything that involves giving away another company’s IP, even if they accidentally let you see a copy of it. “Finders keepers” doesn’t work with IP.

Sure, the recipient doesn't have the right to call it their own or commercially distribute/benefit from it. I didn't make a claim otherwise.

I said the code they have does not infringe on the commercially released product called StarCraft as it is not a portion thereof. I even stated that releasing it or otherwise making it available is tenuous at best. So I'm not even sure what you're arguing.

> “Finders keepers” doesn’t work with IP.

He didn't "find" it, they willingly transferred it to him along with a bunch of other things they randomly grabbed from their warehouse.

"IP" is a collection of various laws and contracts used to keep exclusivity, it doesn't exist on its own. No law mentions IP. I am not sure the case is a firm as you say it is. Especially since he didn't sign anything.

Not publishing doesn't break any law and that disc is worth more in any way than a few knick-knacks.

And if you don't make an online post about it you could even anonymously leak it to archive.org or something so at least that game won't be yet another that's lost forever thanks to DRM.

Sports teams do it all the time.

Congrats catching that ball that could be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, would you like a grab bag of team merchandises instead?

Reminder: full source leak should include binaries and source for 3rd party libraries Rockstar licensed to use - so this leak could impact other companies too.

Related, I released the source code to Heroes of Newerth (a dota 2 competitor) after the company died (after dota 2 pulverized them). https://github.com/shawwn/noh

Oh man, what a nostalgia trip. I spent a lot of nights as a teenager playing Savage, S2 and then HoN. Thanks for the link. I have a fond memory of Marc kicking me off a pub S2 game because I slow debuffed him as the commander.

One time I walked into James Fielding’s office, our lead designer. He had a crumpled keyboard on his desk that he used as a pencil holder. I asked him what the hell, and he said it was a trophy from an inhouse game when Marc smashed his keyboard after losing.

He was an interesting fellow. He tried to teach me the value of self awareness, a lesson I was too young to internalize. I see now it was because he spent many years trying to break his raging habit.

The full source tree is at https://github.com/shawwn/hon by the way. There’s a lot of server side components and installer misc that were eluded from NoH, but you might like browsing.

That's amazing. I was wondering how you had the rights to do it. Apparently you don't?

> All code and assets are MIT licensed, to the extent that I'm authorized to do so. Which is to say, not at all. But nobody cares at this point

Kudos! I guess you know the people will enough to know they won't go after you?

So many people loved HoN, great to see it shared!

Private servers are already possible and also popular. The network is called FiveM and it has a lot more features and customization than the original.

> I really wish more games shared the source, even if it's under a restrictive license. It's just interesting to get a peak under the hood.

Don't underestimate that software patents play a role in that. For instance, the source code release of Doom 3 had to be modified to remove a rendering technique under patent by Creative - even though John Carmack invented the technique simultaneously and independently of Creative[0]

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/gaming/2011/11/17/2569394/john-carm...

The original Doom had third-party audio playback routines, so the source came with a rewritten sound server: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/tree/master/sndserv

    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.

That would be very interesting indeed! Knowing nothing about actual game development, I always imagine games must have the worst spaghetti code imaginable. They are an artistic product with a shelf life of at most a couple of years. Once it gets running, the quality of the code must have a priority below almost anything else.

It's probably different these days with much lrger teams and engines like Unreal, but still.

> I really wish more games shared the source, even if it's under a restrictive license. It's just interesting to get a peak under the hood.

technically true, but the risk of tainting FOSS projects to the point they can be killed by corporate lawyers could be too high. What if a FOSS developer implements in perfect good faith an algorithm that shares some resemblance to a proprietary shared source piece of code they just studied two months before? Could whoever owns that code have enough grounds to send a c&d to stop any development if not attempting to take ownership of the project? Not sure if I'd like to test that. As much as I deeply dislike closed source, I'm convinced that having a firm distinction between open and closed helps to avoid some dangerous grey areas.

Self-plug: Old World, a 4X game from the lead of Civ4, has from day one shipped with a copy of the entire gameplay source code. It's not the full source of the game as the rendering-related parts and a couple systems classes are excluded but most of that is handled by Unity anyway, but every bit of game logic is public.

> peak

peek