EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3
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And then us gamers get more long-lived games as a benefit as well.
EA also open sources stuff like that. They even have open sourced a java library to be able to write async await style code in java. They off course won't open source money making games, and neither does MSFT.
The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, and EA is just flatly evaluating that to False every the time. Even when they aren't actively selling a title they own the rights to. The expected value of a title you don't sell is $0 [0], so in effect they're valuing goodwill negatively!
When it's framed that way, it's actually pretty dumb for EA not to be making that calculation. If they do and open source more low sales titles, EA will make more money from better goodwill, and consumers will get more value from older games
[0] This isn't strictly true, because they retain the rights to sell the title in the future, and that option is worth something. But barring very strange circumstances, we expect that if an old title isn't worth the effort to sell today, it likely won't be in the future either. The option is not worth a ton vs. the goodwill of open sourcing it.
Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced? Which of the microsoft open source projects were formerly for sale. I am very sure it would be very very few, and only in those areas where open source competitors are already strong.
EA does tons of stuff open source. Have a look at their GitHub. I am not even sure microsoft has made a similar amount of their internal libraries a available.
Electronic Arts: 27 repos
Azure: 1.8k repos
n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.
MS is open-sourcing the pieces of cheese that lead to their proprietary cloud-shaped trap. I don't think they've open-sourced anything related to Azure itself (i.e. if I wanted to run my own Azure-like cloud).
I'm not saying it's a bad or even unethical strategy. I'm just saying that MS is not, remotely, an open-source company.
> Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced?
Neither Visual Studio Code nor .NET core fits this criteria. Visual Studio IDE is not free and open source and neither is the older version of .NET framework.
Launch a .NET core application inside visual studio code. Even that comes with a warning saying you can only use the debugger within certain limited situations.
For Microsoft this seems to have worked out fine - they’ve helped create an eco system around VS Code and now they are integrating it in all sorts of ways with their paid services.
Valve especially has made a ton of money buying and selling fanmade expansions to their games, way more than they would have by not allowing mods
Uhh, .NET?
https://azure.github.io/SONiC/
OSS NOS that runs in white box hardware from Broadcom, Mellanox, Centec, etc. ASIC driver includes closed source items depending on the ASIC vendor.
Now to be fair they are doing this to force the traditional switch vendors to support what they need to run their network at a lower cost. Both Arista and Juniper support SONiC on their HW and I believe (fact not in cache right now) that Cisco supports the SAI configuration layer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2
* https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...
Nowadays, they have seen that if they provide software as "open source", and not only "free", not only do they get eyeballs, they also get "feel good" points from the community, and I assume they use that to attract customers to their revenue streams (Azure I guess).
It certainly shocked the developers of its engine. They licensed it to Microsoft for a share of the profit and ended up suing Microsoft over that stunt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars
After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people.
The open code to the software we use should not be a handout or a gift ex post facto.
The open code to the software should be an invitation: to collaborate on it, audit it, or frankly do anything you want with it (e.g. WTFPL); before, during, and after using it.
Open source should be a big tent - it should be an answer to questions people have many different motives for asking. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You're not wrong, but given the world we live in the incentive would be better. And I would say that's the sort of "non-reformist reform" that's liable to push towards the ideal, not appease and reinforce the status quo.
> You're not wrong
"Not wrong" seems like a... generous... description of this viewpoint. Lots of places tried the system of "all housing is publicly held"; it was not a success.
https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/is-the-wtfpl-g...
> Third-party software made available under one of these licenses must not be part of Google products that are delivered to outside customers.
This policy covers all 3 versions of the GPL. And yet they made Android, based on the Linux kernel.
I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.
As copyright pushed to things beyond books that also made it easy to forget that original "open source" idealism behind copyright. It's tougher to build a new movie out of the components of a published movie than to build books from the components of published books.
Patent law is where the idea was applied to something that needed "source control preserved": describe an invention in complete detail in a public registry so that others can recreate and get a powerful limited monopoly on it, but as soon as that limit hits everyone should be able to recreate it.
Software patents have long been a mockery of that original spirit of patent law, but "open source projects by companies get stronger piracy protection/what have you for the first X years of their registered life" is really what software patents should have been in the first place, based on the original goals of what patents were for.
Create that tax incentive, and 99% of publishers will slap the "open source" label on something 5 or 10 years old which is completely unmaintained, unusably buggy, and virtually unreadable. Nothing of value will be gained, and big companies will have yet another tax loophole.
I’m sure I’m not the only one (though the number is vanishingly small). It’s difficult to know how large the community is without nekochan.
Hope springs eternal. :)
I'm running a Irix 6.2 desktop on my PC right now.
Also fun fact: up to version 6 of the MIPS port of NetBSD, you could run Irix binaries. I'm pretty sure it can boot in qemu-mips which would be another avenue for some ability to run certain Irix software on PC.
Commonly Physics Engines, like Havok and others.
Can't wait for MS to learn from EA and open source Windows 95.
Given they've only made it to DOS 2.0 so far, it might take them a while to open source Windows 95, but it no longer seems like an impossibility either.
Unfortunately, while AoE2:DE is an awesome game, they have done neither…
Good thing that there are projects like OpenAge going on!
For example, not long ago, Quake II RTX was released by NVIDIA as a way to demonstrate the advanced raytracing capabilities of their new RTX cards. A decision made in 2001 (open sourcing Quake II) continues to benefit the world today.
Decades ago, Sun Microsystems open sourced OpenOffice, Java and Solaris. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is one of the few office suites available free of cost.
Before Microsoft acquired Github, Github open sourced Atom, an editor similar in scope to VS Code. They also open sourced Electron, which is the framework used by VS Code.
Smaller companies have been doing much more. Microsoft has open sourced some interesting projects, but to say that companies are open sourcing projects because Microsoft is a pioneer in open source is just 4/20 talk.
Microsoft will never open source strategic projects like DirectX, Microsoft Office, SQL server or Windows. They will keep making money hand over fist.
EA has a few things open sourced.
Imagine if Bungie open-sourced Destiny and Destiny 2.
Sure, you don't have to buy the game anymore to get the software, but they also don't have to let you onto their immersive and highly moderated and orchestrated servers. They can offer their own signed builds that you need to access the official universe.
So you could still break the game apart and build new content for fun, but the main game could still stand on its own and still be easy to sell to people because you're not selling the world, you're selling the experience.
I wonder if active support for open source by game companies will eventually reap the benefits it ostensibly does for big tech companies. For example, by open sourcing React, FB not only can influence JS frameworks in general, it can cultivate a hiring pool of engineers already familiar or proficient with React internals. There's already limited precedent with game companies hiring creators of big-time mods (Valve hiring the creator of Dota). But I'd think more open source support and reducing the friction for fans to become creators would surface even more talent.
The original Red Alert came with a map editor way back when as well :-)
It's probably been 22 years (!!), but IIRC it was strictly for editing terrain only. You couldn't place buildings, place units, or script scenarios.
Which is only in the interesst of small companies, but against the interesst of big companies. Basically any single-game-company has a strong interesst in a long-selling game, take Minecraft, Stardew Valley or League of Legends. They are selling the same game for a decade and make good money with it. Though in case of League of Legends it's "game as a service"-approach, not just a single game without any extras.
Big companies like EA on the other side invest regulary in development of new games and need people to buy them all. Thouhg, they do have those "game as a service"-types too, for example Sims, which get's flooded with small extra-content, skins and little crap. Allowing modding there would totally kill this business-concept, because then people would not need anymore to buy the costly stuff from EA, but get it for free from somewhere.
Apparently, Microsoft is now the exemplary open source hero. Previous to them, there was none other to learn from.
I'm sure there are more examples of companies embracing open source after previously looking down on it, maybe you have some names handy?
Long term, the involvement of companies like Microsoft in OSS and OSS communities might be damaging, not beneficial.
I'm going to reconsider my point when everyone can compile their own fork of Windows and Office.
As noted elsewhere ITT, "we made the decision to go with the GPL license to ensure compatibility with projects like CnCNet and Open RA."
Given the progress of OpenRA, and quality of the above release video, the open source version seems like it is likely to eclipse the capability of the original game in the foreseeable future.
I'm curious what the OpenRA community pulls out of this newly released source code that can be used directly or by reimplemented in OpenRA to create substantial leaps in progress.
I'm also curious which of the existing OpenRA algorithms and methods are better or more efficient than the original source.
Regardless, this release and the resulting introspective should make for some good reading!
The only thing that is unbalanced at the moment is sea vs land. Allied cruisers with GPS are just overpowered and almost unconquerable.
Some games are decompiled versions of of the code, e.g. Devilution which I'm fairly sure is not legal (though I doubt anyone is going to care).
OpenRA rebalances the game significantly, improves the AI, and greatly modernises the interaction with units.
They both have their place and utility.
Sweet.
While the commercial value of the code dropped to about 0 over a decade ago (or did it?), eventual release of source code is better than never releasing source code.
I've been playing old classic multiplayer games with some friends while we're isolating. Halo 1 for PC, BF1942, Battlefield II. All free or like 5$.
Red Alert mostly ok under WINE on OSX or Linux but it prompted me to get windows running on a machine.
Forgotten Hope was originally a badass mod for BF42 that added a ton of extra units. That and Desert Combat got me into gaming and modding back in the early 00’s!
I learned how to write scripts and markdown running cod and BF servers.
Forgotten Hope 2 has its own workarounds and launcher. Other mods (and vanilla players) use BF2Hub, which wraps around bf2.exe I think to redirect DNS calls to the defunct EA and gamespy servers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/6xx6za/bfl_the...
edit: this was for BF1942. We haven't tried BF2.
For example OpenTTD [0] was reverse engineered and you have 2 options to actually play the game
- either have the original game and use the arts/graphics and music/sound data from the original files
- use the open source remake of the arts/graphics and music/sound
The 2nd option where a lot of open source clones fail. It's one thing to have the engine and the bare metal game but the actual arts/graphics usually takes more time to recreate. That's where OpenTTD is really successful because you can just download the game and play.
As another example an open source clone of Red Alert already exist [1] but it's just the engine. To actually play you need the original arts/graphics
But that looks really bad, and to make it look good (as almost any even mid-budget video game looks) you need an art director who can deliver consistency. For a small game that art director might also just make all the art, so it ends up consistent that way, but games even from the C&C era are too big for that to be realistic, so now you've got several (and maybe hundreds of) volunteers making art and they need to obey that director's stylistic vision or the result is something that lay people can see is "wrong" but they aren't sure exactly why.
There's a little element of this in the programming side. One guy who stubbornly insists on calling loop variables 'x' another insists they should be named 'k' and three others who don't care can already get heated. Or maybe you've run into somebody who believes code should use character U+0009 for indentation instead of using U+0020 as god intended. But the players won't notice that part, whereas if the art isn't consistent that's very visible and detracts from the experience.
"The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning." John 3:8
And all that have unicodes in the keyboards, and in the memories, of all that move in the disks, and of any living thing which is in the extended ranges, they shall be an abomination unto you."
Is it possible to download these ISOs from EA today? On Origin, Red Alert is only available as part of the Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection, which isn't free of charge.
Only about half of the missions
“Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license”
I assume “their corresponding source code” means “the code for those DLLs”, but I do wonder why they bother mentioning the DLLs at all.
This continued with Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. Generals came on two CDs but it used the “install disc” + “play disc” system rather than the “lend one to a friend” model used previously. Then CNC3 was released on a single DVD.
At the time I had only an old 486 with a 500MB disk under DOS, and I played this game quite extensively.
I even remember cutting the sound to gain a few FPS, which enabled me to go from "unplayable" to "barely usable" ^^.
Same applies for Tiberian Sun. GDI and NOD CD's.
I have them all via the "The Command & Conquer Collection" released back in 2003.
Source:
Red Alert: https://i.imgur.com/xD7j08b.jpg
Tiberian Sun: https://i.imgur.com/xD7j08b.jpg
So the talk about open source might just be marketing fluff.
1. https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection/...
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_o...
I did a Python implementation here: https://github.com/eamonnmr/openlockstep
They also confirmed it will be in C++
But what about the art assests. Moving to the future, those become more valuable, particularly as coding becomes more advanced. While coders have a habit of happily rewriting things to make them work better, visual stuff has a lot more nostalgia factor, as well as actually having them available makes the progress made on the code side seem a lot more real.
Surely this isn't the only game where code is only part of the issue (if it is, I really don't know what the plan is in this instance).
EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative: https://ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2007/...
>REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 2007--Today Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) announced the company will donate the original SimCity™ -- the blockbuster 1989 game credited with giving rise to the city-building game genre -- to each computer in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. OLPC is a not-for-profit humanitarian effort to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptops with the goal of giving every child in the world access to modern education. By gifting SimCity onto each OLPC laptop, EA is providing users with an entertaining way to engage with computers as well as help develop decision-making skills while honing creativity. This is the first time a major video game publisher has gifted a game to the world.
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...
>Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.
>[...] The next chapter looks closely at the code to SimCity, which is possible only because it has been open sourced. There are few instances in which a company has open sourced the code to a commercial game, which makes the story of how this happened remarkable for a number of reasons. Recounting this story not only explains the provenance of my research materials, but reveals how social forces, in this case a heterogeneous collection of agents and agendas, shape software.
>[...] Surprisingly, Electronic Arts agreed to the arrangement. Their legal counsel, in consultation with Eben Moglen (Columbia Law Professor, general counsel to the FSF, and OLPC advisor), worked through the legal logistics. This effort was aided by Hopkins’s discovery and copying of the original Maxis/DUX licensing agreement, on a lark, while working on The Sims. Hopkins did the coding work of the conversion. EA executives approved of the endeavor, no doubt aided by Will Wright’s legendary persuasiveness and considerable prestige, not to mention the prestige of the OLPC project itself. [...]
Demo of SimCity on OLPC XO-1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKhh10K-j0
>OLPC SimCity Demo: A demonstration of OLPC SimCity running on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop.
OLPC / EA Contract: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
>This license and distribution agreement (this "Agreement") is entered into as of September 4, 2007 (the “Effective Date”) by and between ELECTRONIC ARTS INC., a Delaware corporation with its principal offices at 209 Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, CA 94065-1175 (“EA”) and ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD ASSOCIATION, INC., a Delaware corporation, located at One Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA, 02142 ( “OLPC”).
Free SimCity Source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis
>Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.
If you like strategy games
I wonder why it's not more common to open source abandonware that has exactly zero remaining commercial value. These game companies don't even have to remain as maintainers/stewards of the code. It doesn't even have to compile. Just release it, and many people will get it to work! How much expense could it be to get an intern to upload the code to GitHub, slap a license on it, and never look at it again?
I'm a big fan and played WFTO quite a bit at to the point it's hard to go back to DK2. Sadly their AI got much worse with the 2.0 patch and I gave it up.
There is a Dungeon Keeper 1 remake https://dungeonkeeper.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper_FX which similar to lots of these efforts uses the original artwork and sounds.
There are some other DK clones and descendants, but my second favorite would be the very late Dwelvers https://dwelvers.com/ which has been in development for an eternity and the developer shows up once or twice a year with an update. This is the most ambitious of the DK clones as it includes a much larger economy and even the long promised above ground!
If it's actually abandoned, then there's probably nobody around who can do that.
Otherwise, what's the incentive? And there's always someone who thinks they can milk the title by selling it in a retro bundle or a cheap remastered edition. Of course, these days you don't even need a remake to milk old titles.
https://www.gog.com/game/dungeon_keeper_2
Does anyone know if there are any similar modern games btw?
Satellite Reign is considered to be a modern take on Syndicate.
But presumably, if you own the game, you now have everything you need to modify it however you like.
They release it so that you can mod it, but they don't give the assets for free.
Why is that a problem? Everyone wins.
EA says "this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL". Well it's not GPL, but Relic is famous for it's RTS titles like Dawn of War, Company of Heroes (and now it's developing Age of Empires IV). Homeworld is one of the best RTS games for me (only second to C&C).
Sadly we can't get the source of Homeworld 2 (they even lost the source code of expansion pack), which the Remastered was built on.
It's probably that combined with the nostalgia of 'old folks' like me. I'd love to relive the Wilhelm scream and cheesy futurism of C&C. And I will always love the wololo of AoE.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...
I don't know any examples of this happening, but we've seen the engine/assets distinction before when DOOM and Quake were opened. Their source code was released as Free and Open Source software, but the game assets remain payware to this day.
The vast majority of game studios aren't willing to do this, so effectively releasing it under the GPL means that it's much less likely that a competitor uses the code.
Asset flips from other countries with more permissive (or just hard to access for foreigners) legal systems are already a problem for game developers--releasing the source code for your game would ensure that you'd be inundated with assets flips almost immediately if your game is any good.
I'm not a lawyer.
It doesn't work this way in games (at least for now), EA is only releasing part of the code for modding purpose, EA doesn't expect an "open source community" established on this codebase, and I also don't think EA has the intention to take contributions directly from community (by "directly" I mean, in code). If you have something you don't like about the game, post a comment in Steam and if you are lucky the devs are going to fix it themselves. It has always been working in this way in games, and it's not changing despite the "open source" action. So in this case, GPL is actually more helpful for EA, as illustrated by other replies.
But what I really want to say is, being a C&C modder myself (I've been modding RA2/YR from 2009 and also briefly worked on C&C3 later), I wholeheartedly support EA's decision to use GPL. Not because it's good for EA, not because I'm also a fan of RMS, it's because of the specific situation of the modding community.
If we take a simplistic view of a mod, it's roughly composed of "assets" and "code" (the same could be said for full games but it'll be more complicated). For assets, there are awesome free content creation software such as Blender and Krita, and tons of learning resources on the Internet. One can easily become a quasi-professional artist given enough exercise (I, personally, have undergone such a process). Well there is also things like music, but they all work the same way in which you "just create something in some external application (which is usually very powerful and extendable) and throw it in the game". You are not really limited in terms of asset.
The real problem is in "code" - modders are ultimately constrained by a proprietary engine, which heavily limits the possibility of mods. Just think about it: when you're making a real game, you can think about "What is the most interesting stuff I can come up with?" and then implemented it in the game engine. But when making a mod, whenever a fancy idea pops up, you're obligated to consider "Can it be implemented in the engine?". Unfortunately, most of the time, the answer is no. And this goes on and on, till a point where your imagination is imprisoned by the capability of the engine, that you lost the inspiration to design anything novel.
Why the engine is so limited? I think we can just imagine the scenario: in the crunch of getting the game finished, the devs don't really care about moddability, they just want to get it working ASAP, then they do all kinds of hack all the way along. In the end the game works, but modding it sucks. They hardcoded many stuff directly into the game engine binary, which is perfectly reflected by this set of search result: https://www.google.com/search?q=hardcode+site%3Amodenc.reneg... ... Oh and this is only about modifying existing stuff, we haven't started talking about adding a completely new system yet ...
To overcome these limitations, modders did a tremendous amount of efforts over the years:
There are attempts to reverse engineer the binary and patch it for workarounds: https://modenc.renegadeprojects.com/RockPatch
Then this approach evolved, they analyzed the binary to get the class hierarchy of the game, then use C++ to write new logic, inject the compiled routines into the binary: https://ares.strategy-x.com
There are attempts to rebuild the complete source code of the engine by incremental reverse-engineering: https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Thyme
There are attempts to rewrite the whole game: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA https://github.com/OpenSAGE/OpenSAGE
It seems I digressed a lot, but while one can make very sophisticated models, the "upper limit" of a mod, and the ceiling of the modding community as a whole, really lies on:
* How one can extend the engine. But this makes sense only if one can do this, i.e. has the skill, time, and resource to do it. It's not just some arbitrary CRUD logic, it's bulks of assembly code compiled from poorly written sources (thankfully the compiler is also poor so not much optimization).
* How one can make the best use of the existing features of the engine in absurd ways. For example, suppose I want a tank firing laser from the sky (think about Athena Cannon in Red Alert 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbX7R3UYtzI), the engine doesn't offer such a feature. The solution is to set the Z component of the unit's "firing coordinate" to 65535 so it "looks like" firing from sky.
A more advanced example would be mimicing the sweeping laser of Colossus in Starcraft 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5YEI-_o5dQ), or laser of Future Tank/Giga Fortress in RA3. To do this, one can 1) Make a unit launch a V3 rocket, but make the rocket invisible; 2) Add a weapon to that unit, that automatically attacks the "rocket" it fires, make the weapon draws laser. Then as the "rocket" is approaching the target, the unit will attacking the rocket with laser, and as the rocket is moving, the laser will look to be sweeping. That's how you get this "BTS": https://www.moddb.com/mods/mklab/images/behind-the-scene
Surely this is a horrible hack and it'll break as soon as you have multiple Colossuses in a perimeter simultaneously - the laser weapon works by "filtering all rockets of a specific tag", but the tag can't be made specific to every "instance" of Colossus - there is just no such feature! They will just randomly pick a rocket fired by others and draw the laser and the whole stuff breaks up.
In reality, most people ends up in the later way because they can't do reverse engineering, there are many clever tricks just like the one above contrived by clever people. And even if you're working on the engine binary itself, it'll just be more difficult and time consuming to extract any non-trivial stuff from the huge sequence of instructions. All these won't be necessary if the game is open sourced. I personally feel sorry for all these brilliant minds "wasted" on these useless shits. And that's exactly why I don't do modding anymore (maybe I'll pick it up again if this open source of Remastered turns out to be interesting enough).
However, despite the grim situation, some people that's working on workarounding the engine just lock their stuff for themselves, for their own mods. They're not sharing. This means newcomers can't leverage their existing program databases to do new work, can't get their own features integrated with others, and even redoing much of others work (no source code access). As a result, fewer people want to get into this business.
This is not an accident: TibSun/RA2 uses their own ".mix" archive for storing assets and some of the code. It kinda like plain tar, just concatenate all files together w/o compression. But the format is designed to be read only by the game. It allows the archive to store only hashes of the filenames, the actually filenames can be omitted in the archive. When the game requests for a certain file it just use hash to identify the file. We have a GPL tool for working with these files. But to protect unapproved reuse of assets and modding of the mod itself, some modders intentionally omit the filename in archives of the mod they distributes to make it incomprehensible for other humans. They also tinkered with the file header so it's only readable by the game and not by other tools. This is, in fact, very reasonable, I'd say 60% people in the modding community are idiots, they're somewhat likely to just rip assets from other mods and use in their own mods without even crediting the original author. And sometimes it's just the author wants some "unique" stuff in his/her mod, and absolutely don't want others to use it under any term.
90% of the modding community don't know enough about free software, open source or GitHub (also reasonable since the modding community is just samples from ordinary players, and that's also why EA can't expect a proper "open source community"). They don't know how sharing stuff can make things much better. Of course it's their freedom to protect their work, and few people want to share stuff with idiots. I'm mostly with them for protecting assets. But as I said, the engine stuffs are different. These techs are critical for the future of the community, and are best shared as much as possible. I know someone who did some work on the engine, and has been treating these work as the most closely guarded secret since then, and even becomes paranoid. He once consulted me about "how to protect these magic from being exposed to the public with his mod". Well technically you can do it! (of course only to some degree) But what's the point of doing this?
That's why I think the GPL license mandated on the Remastered source can really make the community much more healthy. Though I'm not very confidence about it - I also discussed with the paranoid guy above about GPL long before the Remastered. I think one can easily infer that if one don't get the point of free software and open source, then he is also not likely to know GPL at all, even if he knows GPL he still can't get the point of it, and will hold the most utilitarianism view towards open source: If I can use it, then take it for myself and hide it deep inside my mod, if I can't use it, find some workaround to use it. After all, it's not likely that EA will sue a non-profit modder for a minor licence violation ...
Edit: Fix the typesetting
I assume there are other libraries, artwork, and some kind of launcher exe, which would presumably remain closed source.
I guess it really jumpstarts the efforts to make an opensource version of the game, but it really might still be a long way off yet.