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Ask Slashdot: How To Get Old Commercial Software To Be Open-Sourced?
First time accepted submitter Optic7 writes "Many gamers have probably dreamed about the idea of an old favorite game or other no longer supported or developed commercial software being converted to an open-source license so that it could be updated to add new features, support new hardware, other operating systems, etc. However, this type of change of license seems exceedingly rare, unless the copyright holder itself decides on its own that it would be beneficial. The only examples I could think of or was able to find in a brief internet search were Blender (3D animation software that had its source code bought from creditors after a crowd-funding campaign) and Warzone 2100 (Game that had its source code released after a successful petition). With those two examples of different strategies in mind, have any of you ever participated in any efforts of this kind, and what did you learn from it that may be useful to someone else attempting the same thing? Even if you have not participated, do you have any suggestions or ideas that may be useful to such an effort?"
Yes, but they develop everything in-house. Once you start contracting for the engine, art, sound, etc., it becomes more difficult.
And what company wants to release code today in our litigious environment. Patent trolls would have a field day. It is safer for most companies to keep their code locked up than to allow these patent trolls to freely search and find 6 lines of code that they think violates a patent.
I liked Triplane Turmoil, and old shareware DOS game, a lot. When I met the original developers by accident I offered to help port the game to SDL and managed to convince them to release it as open source: http://triplane.sf.net/
They're not selling it, they're just using it. No one bitches when Random Dude modifies code on his end for his own purposes, why does it matter if it's Random Corp instead?
Releasing a previously closed source project to open source is much harder then people realize.
1. You have to deal with many copyright owners. If you look at some titles you may see mutable companies connected to it. Some of these companies have been closed or acquired however there is someone who still own some copyright. You need to get all those parties to agree.
2. You might open source it. But it probably can't be GPL. Sometimes you will find that they used third party libraries. That are closed source and those companies are active in the developments libraries. Assuming these library owners allow you to release the source with there reference in them.
3. Companies will sometimes hold onto the title to make a remake/reboot/sequel later. Or they will sell a package cd of all the games. So they will not want to open the game up.
In general even if you own rights to the source you may not be as free as you thought.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sigh, I just wish I had saved the emails from when I tried talking to some of these defunct game rights holders, because it would have been a perfect example of why we need shorter copyrights and a "use it or lose it"clause but frankly after spending nearly 6 months TRYING to deal with them frankly they just made me wanna puke.
I probably better explain...anybody remember those old shareware discs we got during the days of Win3.x-Win98? You know, those ones filled with cheesy little games from all over the place? Well me and a buddy had the idea that because you can't play those anymore without major hoop jumping that is frankly beyond most, and that is if you can even find the games in the first place, that we'd cook up a nice little GUI frontend to DOSBox and sell flash sticks with these shareware games on them, just to let folks who never got to have that see what it was like and for old farts to have a trip down memory lane.
Now we of course never expected to make any money off of that, any changes to DOSBox would of course been GPLed and the price we were gonna go for was a few bucks over cost plus shipping with the few bucks being split between the guys that had wrote the shareware titles. For us it was strictly a labor of love thing, both me and my friend had kids and we wanted to let them see what it was like when we were their age, so what happened?
We quickly found out that even with games that hadn't been in print in 20+ years and that frankly never sold worth a shit in the first place (we're not talking Doom here folks, we are talking those cheesy knockoffs and platformers and puzzlers) that when we found the owners the amount of sheer fucking insane levels of greed was beyond nuts. There were several wanting 4 and 5 figures up front NOT for the code, NOT for even the complete game, but just for the right to use the original shareware! And many wanted the rights to OUR code on top! The sad part is we also found that we could just go the Chinamart route and say fuck the IP bullshit and get it done that way.
In the end we just gave up, and likely that is what they'll have to do in TFA. With copyright law as it is your grandkids will be in the nursing home before these games are PD, if they EVER are, and the ones that end up with the rights act like every 5th rate game that was placed on a floppy or CD with a dozen other games should bring in the kind of revenue it would have if it was Ms Pacman. Good luck dealing with these greedy bastards friend, because they would rather not do a damned thing with it than settle for less than what a AAA game would go for, I swear its fucking insanity!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But you see we were asking for NO RIGHTS other than the right to put it on the stick, that's all. no IP rights, no right to even put our names on the stick other than whatever plug the DOSBox guys might have given us because that would have been there under creators instead. We offered to give them links to any product they wanted to sell, contact info, anything they wanted without asking to do anymore than those original CDs did back in the day, simply offer them up to people at a cheap price. hell we weren't even gonna ask for the rights to use any of their images in the artwork, instead letting them choose whether they wanted to put something from their game or a logo or not.
so they went from getting an equal cut of every cent over the cost to...nothing. absolutely fucking nothing. Not a SINGLE ONE of the games we were looking at had been in print or sold anywhere for ANY price since the days of Win95, in fact we had gone out of our way to buy up old as the hills shareware discs to purposely find the weird quirky crap you'd find on the discs back then. And I'd remind you that the whole point of those original shareware discs was to sell a taste of a game and link back to the owner with contact info so they could sell you the complete game, not to get the same price as the next Gears Of War, yet that was EXACTLY what these companies wanted. To put just 5 games on the stick we would have had to sell each stick for more than D3, do you HONESTLY think anybody is gonna pay diablo 3 money for a game running in DOSBox that hasn't been touched in 20-25 years?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.