In this case the software in question was a game. I have not seen any visble business models for truly open source games under the acceptable licenses for F-Droid. There are source-available games, but that would not be enough in this case.

I think the main issue may be how much up-front investment games need that would never be recouped with an open source license, but I'd love to be shown an example to the contrary.

Game is its own thing indeed and I'll admit that first, I don't play much, and second, never even started thinking about business models for open source games.

Maybe you could license the data for a fee and have the code as open source?

Of course this is low effort and you know way better than me.

I've done a fair bit of open source work, but the best I could come up with for games is "source available" where you can get the code to recompile for yourself or mod it. (My wife and I put up the source code of our first game as a DLC on Steam as an experiment.)

Re only code: Game engines often tie code and data together and the code without the data won't even compile in many cases, or you won't be able to produce a new dataset because documenting the required settings is a monumental task.

Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money. There is no complementary product or service you can sell with it. Reviewing and incorporating community fixes requires work and potentially legal review as not everyone in the modding community is also necessarily well versed in IP law. All these things need funding which is not a given if the game is open source in any meaningful way. If a game is truly open source, a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you, so there is an incentive to make creating an alternative build as hard as possible, defeating the entire idea of open source.

I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones, but F-Droid's policies (most known alternative) make that impossible. (To be clear, it's a perfectly legit choice, I just wish there was a meaningful alternative to Google.)

(Not commenting most of your comment, I assumed a clear data and code separation because that's typically what doom does, but that's very old and I'm utterly incompetent in this domain)

> Finally, there is no real benefit to open sourcing a game if you want to make money.

the same thing can be said for pretty much all software (although it's not always actually true, sometimes open source is a selling point and/or have specific strengths beyond ethics)

> a less than ethical company with a bunch of cheap labor can go and undercut you

Isn't the data which is the most costly part in developing a game? Of course I realize you stated that separating the data is not practical.

> I would like to be able to release on an alternative storefront so people who want to degoogle their phones

Still 100% with you on this. Also degoogled with some proprietary software is still a step in the right direction

I wish that transparency and security were a selling point in gaming, but to me it doesn't seem like it. People will install all kinds of stuff and give them administrator permissions without a second thought. Anti-cheat eating itself into the kernel seems to be perfectly normal for most people. It's an entertainment product and people don't want to be inconvenienced for the most part.

Regarding the development costs, I'm not exactly an expert and I have never worked in a game studio (apart from the company my wife and I are running), but let's take StarCraft 2 for example. If you were to have the engine, but not the art, you could likely easily develop a very capable multiplayer RTS game. Heroes of the Storm was developed out of a StarCraft 2 mod[1]. As another example, Stormgate[2], made by ex Blizzard devs, is getting a whole lot of press coverage for their netcode. It stands to reason that a good engine and netcode are very real competitive advantages in the RTS space. Other game types, such as a walking sim or an adventure game will have a lot less "secret sauce" in the code and more in the art, voice acting, etc. (The Invincible[3] is great in this area) so the code/data split would likely heavily depend on the type of game. (Games can also become very messy between art, visual scripting, engine settings and code, which is what makes releasing the code separately tricky.)

My wife and I are (slowly, next to the day job) working on a Python programming/learning game and hopefully we'll manage to make a clean split between the engine and the art because it would be important for modding. However, I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing it under an open source license because it would cut off a potential source of revenue to license it to educators wanting to make their own challenges and courses. Maybe later we'll figure out that the base game makes enough money and it doesn't matter anymore, but it's really hard to predict success. As a game dev I would really like to make it possible, for example, for game archivists to do their work legally, for people to legally backup and rebuild their games for newer operating systems, or for their kids to be able to inherit their games[4], but carving out specific exceptions, especially for unknown future use cases 10-20 years down the line is exceptionally hard and I'm also not a lawyer, so for desktop the Steam Subscriber Agreement is governing our PC releases for now.

[1]: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Heroes_of_the_Storm

[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/an-upcoming-rts-will-incorporate-the...

[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/

[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...

I appreciate the thoughts you put into this, and thanks for sharing.

Why would a game need to be a business?

Because it takes time and quite some work to build one and there's nothing wrong wanting to live from it.

Sure, but nobody is forcing you to publish on F-Droid.

I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against. I think janosdebugs made it quite clear what they are trying to do.

You do realize that many apps on F-Droid are developed by businesses? OSMAnd, Fennec, Jitsi Meet, Element, Telegram being big examples. We also had the Simple family of apps for a while.

Shattered Pixels is one example of a game with a commercial side that is published on f-droid.

> I won't trust no tracking if it's non free.

Meanwhile, lots of non-mobile free software includes tracking (telemetry) these days. The cynic in me has had to switch to

I won't trust no tracking if it's not enforced by a security boundary.

Which free software does this without asking / telling the user? Especially free software that tells you no tracking?

But yes, free software is not a guarantee against tracking. It only allows auditing and be modified.

Here's a sampling of stuff I've semi-recently encountered on Github that all spy on you by default. For some, it's undocumented, for others it's a minor subsection in the docs. (Some of them are source-available not free, I didn't keep track as I collected the URLs.)

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone

https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine

https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch/

https://github.com/coder/code-server

https://github.com/loft-sh/devpod

https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

https://github.com/rilldata/rill-developer/

https://github.com/hocus-dev/hocus

https://github.com/firezone/firezone

Here's a write-up of how bad it gets -- it's pretty obnoxious: https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry....

VSCode is proprietary.

That's why the difference between Codium and VSCode matters. Actually, IIRC the code from the ms repo does not do telemetry, they add it to the binary they distribute.