It'll either all be in the cloud, so you never run the code...
Or it'll be on a chip, in a hermetically sealed usb drive, that you plug in to your computer.
> An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is "open source" cause they share the code and then having a license that says you can't use any part of it in any way.
Similarly if you ever use that software or depending on where you downloaded it from, you might have agreed not to decompile or read the source code. Using that code is a gamble.
And it will be great for retro game preservation.
Having more integrated tools and tutorials on this would be awesome.
First we get to tackle all of the small ideas and side projects we haven't had time to prioritize.
Then, we start taking ownership of all of the software systems that we interact with on a daily basis; hacking in modifications and reverse engineering protocols to suit our needs.
Finally our own interaction with software becomes entirely boutique: operating systems, firmware, user interfaces that we have directed ourselves to suit our individual tastes.
I expect that for games the more important piece will be the art assets - like how the Quake game engine was open source but you still needed to buy a copy of the game in order to use the textures.
FOSS specifically means/meant free and open source software, the free and software words are there for a reason
so we don’t need another distinction like “source available” that people need to understand to convey an already shared concept
yes, companies abuse their community’s interest in something by blending open source legal term as a marketing term
Relevant: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/82431
> When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation. Once the work has other contributors (each a copyright holder), “nobody” starts including you.
See my other comment: >>46175760
They had gotten surprisingly close to a complete decompilation, but then they tried to request a copy of the source code from the copyright office citing that they needed it as a result of ongoing unrelated litigation with Nintendo.
Later on this killed them in court.
Though, that’s only for actively developer software. I can imagine a great future where all retro games are now source available.
Obviously others aren’t concerned or don’t live in jurisdictions where that would be an issue.
That's very different from the decompilation projects being discussed here, which do distribute the decompiled code.
These decompilation projects do involve some creative choices, which means that the decompilation would likely be considered a derivative work, containing copyrightable elements from both the authors of the original binary and the authors of the decompilation project. This is similar to a human translation of a literary work. A derivative work does have its own copyright, but distributing a derivative work requires permission from the copyright holders of both the original and the derivative. So a decompilation project technically can set their own license, and thereby add additional restrictions, but they can't overwrite the original license. If there is no original license, the default is that you can't distribute at all.
...but it's very clearly not an open source license.