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I kinda wish it was common to have something part way between open source and commercial software:
- you buy the software/subscription and you get the source
- you can fork it to add your own features, fix stuff
- but it’s clear if you contribute back there’s no expectation of payment
- all source remains property of the dev, not allowed to release source publicly etc
As an indie dev of both games and apps the idea of actually releasing software this way scares me of course and I imagine it would be very risky and open to abuse. But… *waves hands*… somehow?!
@joethephish I bought a source licence for a cross-platform audio library that I used for Sorcery! that was sort of like that (because the audio story on Android and elsewhere was so bad back then). It was great! Although it now seems to have vanished from google entirely, so I guess it sadly wasn't a viable business…Searching for "cricket audio" now gives me nothing but insect-related hits (not even anything about the sport!)
@iainmerrick so what you’re saying is that you googled but all you could hear was crickets?
(Interesting! Other examples are game engines - pay enough to Unity and they give you source, similarly we got source to W4’s Godot ports when we paid them)
@joethephish Yeah, I guess this is gamedev-specific in a few ways. It's the sort of model that works for specialized pro tools, which you need in order to build some artifact; but it's only useful for coders, not really for other professions like musicians, designers etc. Not sure who's in that bit of the Venn diagram besides game developers.
@[email protected] I've no idea how successful it was, but Dan Simon actually did this when he created the HERODesigner software (herogames.com/store/category...) for the Hero/Champions #ttrpg.
You can pay for the app, which is obviously what most people do, but you can also pay for the source code to modify the app with your own house rules etc.
I honestly have no idea at all how many copies of the source code were sold, but it was definitely interesting to see this model being tried out 'in the wild'.
@mavnn nice, that’s very cool!
@[email protected] I think some of it came from previous experience with character generators disappearing and leaving people unable to access their old (or even current) characters. That said, I've realised this isn't quite what your were proposing: there's no proviso to release products built on top of the source code, I don't think
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