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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

One of the best things that could happen to the gaming landscape would be if companies like EA and similar learned from Microsoft's move to open sourcing more software and involving the community more gives them a lot more goodwill and business as a side-effect.

And then us gamers get more long-lived games as a benefit as well.

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But Microsoft has not open sourced anything that was making $ for them. Neither windows nor any part of office, or any part of enterprise suite. What Microsoft has open sourced are things where similar stuff was already open source, and Microsoft wouldn't have made much money selling those. e.g, VSCode, tyepscript.

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.

We probably don't expect these companies to open source their primary competitive advantages. We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software.

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.

>We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria,

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.

From GitHub:

Electronic Arts: 27 repos

Azure: 1.8k repos

n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.

It's mostly templates, SDKs, etc.

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.

Service Fabric is open source. SF is basically what powers Azure and tons of other MS cloud based software like sql azure https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric

I would actually go so far as to say it is an unethical strategy. It's just a popular one. And a very successful one.

https://github.com/Microsoft/service-fabric

How about VSCode and .Net Core?

I work with asp.net web api and angular (typescript) but I think the point stands.

> 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.

So it's quantity v. quality. As others said, don't pretend to make people believe you have 1.800 repos worth of useful software. EA may have only 27, but at least it's something you may benefit from even if you're not a customer of theirs.

I don’t pretend that 1.8k are super useful, but I’m still measuring apples to apples. I looked at the EA repos before posting. There’s a few C++ libs, some forks of Kubernetes components that don’t seem active, and some other misc stuff. It’s meaningful, sure, but I think MS does provide plenty of high quality code to close the difference.

Honest question, approximately what percentage of those repositories are original works and what percentage are forks?

The difference is that Electronic arts publishes things that I might actually use, unlike Azure.

there are plenty of use cases for the azure stuff, even if you personally don't see a use for it.

Are we on Reddit?

One aspect EA might be considering are potential losses in other product lines, say if fans were to expand old games with new campaigns that are better than what EA is offering today.

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.

> One aspect EA might be considering are potential losses in other product lines, say if fans were to expand old games with new campaigns that are better than what EA is offering today.

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

Good point, it really depends on how companies decide to look at this topic and what they decide to optimize. The „old“ Microsoft probably wouldn’t have created a platform for Mac devs deploying on Linux as another comment in this thread described.

I don't think people understand how large of a funnel VS Code is. Half the keystrokes I type in a day end up in a Microsoft product, as I dev on a mac and deploy to Linux. Crazy times.

You’re moving the goal posts.

Is he? He's just saying both MS and EA are equivalent in what they open source right now.

MS is open sourcing their platforms which is more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective.

EA has open sourced tons of their internal libraries which are "more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective." Just take a look at their GitHub. What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT. EA is atleast releasing something which made them money as open source.

> What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT?

Uhh, .NET?

I thought mono was developed by a team outside Microsoft.

Microsoft open sourced all of dotnet. Runtime, class library, everything.

All of .net is open source? So you can now run any winforms or wpf app in the operating system of your choice? That's great.

Winforms is a thin wrapper around windows APIs, so no, you can’t.

Not the debugger it seems :(

What about SONiC?

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.

I believe a good portion of Mechcommander 2 source code was made open source (enough to compile and play it), although I don't know if the licence fit the definition of open-source

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2

* https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...

That´s good learning by Microsoft: In the 1990s they "competed" against Netscape with the "free" web browser... it was shocking that they gave it for free, but in reality they were buying eyeballs.

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 was shocking that they gave it for free

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.

That's very interesting! Do you happen to have any reference where I can read more about it? (a search on internet explorer profit licensed lawsuit didn't show anything relevant).

They may not have actually sued, just threatened Microsoft with an audit.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars

Source code without assets is not game, it is just code

VSCode was a fork of the open-source project Atom, and it was never closed-source as far as I know.

VSCode was not a fork of Atom. They started afresh. This is possibly why it’s much more performant than Atom.

Interesting, I always thought VSCode was a fork of Atom.

After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917

It's also interesting to note that the core editor component/library of VSCode (called Monaco) predates Atom. It was used in a variety of places in Azure even before Atom built Atom-shell/Electron, and got a lot of early stress testing in powering the Dev Tools source code views in IE as far back as at least IE 10, IIRC.

I wonder if we could create a tax incentive for this. For example, if a publisher commits to open sourcing N years after release, they get a break on sales. Or get to capitalise R&D more aggressively during development.

I would love to see it applied also to hardware, so that for example when a 8 years old phone that nobody would buy anymore gets opened (including chipsets) small Linux distros can be ported to it, turning it into a hacking platform, IoT terminal, media player, navigator, etc. instead of a paperweight, or worse, more junk into some 3rd world landfill.

IMHO, I think this counters a philosophical point of open source software.

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.

There are times to hold fast to ideals, and times when demanding purity is self-destructive. (And of course wisdom is knowing the difference, and much harder than it looks.)

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.

The old cathedral vs bazaar argument never goes away ;)

That's like saying "landlords shouldn't be incentivized to hand over apartment over to residents after x years, because all housing should be publicly held"

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.

> That's like saying "landlords shouldn't be incentivized to hand over apartment over to residents after x years, because all housing should be publicly held"

> 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.

Ironically of course WTFPL is in fact not "do anything you want with it" despite the claims of the author and fans of the license.

https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/is-the-wtfpl-g...

I'd never read that Google page before. I can't make sense of the section there named The ‘restricted’ licenses. It says:

> 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.

It’s really quite infuriating to me that I can’t just say “yeah I made this, but anyone can have it.”

I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.

https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD

It's the original spirit/sentiment behind patent law and copyright law. Copyright sort of lost the thread on that one over the course of its extensions, but in the case of the book the "source code" to construct the book is very similar to the contents of the book and a limited copyright term was supposed to imply that eventually the public would have access to it after the brief monopoly rights granted to the creators of the work.

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.

"You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out." -- jwz, 1999

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.

This would be a great idea. Could probably have larger and more beneficial results than the government just funding research projects.

A lot of newer games probably include middleware licensed from other companies that make relicensing more challenging

And also, art assets - I've touched on this briefly with an older game from the studio where I work, and basically we could probably release the source code, but since it was a racing game we couldn't release the art assets as they are copyrighted by car manufacturers(or at least it would be a significantly complicated legal problem to not be worth the time).

I believe that's standard and well-understood; Quake's source code has famously been GPL for decades (thanks, Carmack!), but all the data files (e.g. art assets) remain copyrighted.

You can always release the game with some generic art and offer the copyrighted assets in a shop. With some luck the game becomes popular and people add further assets to your shop. Demand some commission and you may have created a cash cow.

Sure, but this particular game was from the late 90s - we looked at re-exporting some of the assets and I have no idea how you'd even approach it without significant time investment, the tools used to make the original art no longer exist(we have the source code for the game, but not for the tools used at the time, I've gone through stacks of old CDs that had backups and 9/10 discs were just gone, completely corrupted), or used hardware that would be difficult to source(like cutscenes made on silicon graphics machines, there is no good way to edit and export these project files on modern machines)

I’ve got a top-spec Octane2 with all the development tools that’s languishing and needs to be put to work.

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. :)

As a former SGI user, I'm afraid we'll never see emulation happen.

SGI emulation has been a thing since the late 90's with SimOS (console only though) and more recently with MAME (full support for Irix desktop) as well as user space emulation with qemu-irix.

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.

For some reason this has completely bypassed me! I've been taking care of my Octane and Indigo2 so I can open my old PA and SI|3D files.. I will definitely look at this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software

I'd say go for it and release just the source code, no assets. If there's enough people with the time and passion to recreate/replace the assets, they will. If not, no harm done :)

Car manufacturers are also specifically notorious for being terrible counterparties in any negotiation

This is why the original Doom (1992) source release had no sound, for example.

Bink Video is another common obstacle for games from the mid-to-late-'90s.

> A lot of newer games probably include middleware licensed from other companies that make relicensing more challenging

Commonly Physics Engines, like Havok and others.

Also, the SDKs for console ports may be under NDA. I’m looking at you, Nintendo Switch.

Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation, this is not unique to Nintendo.

No real reason to call nintendo out here, every console i know of has been that way for many generations.

The reverse happened. MS learned from EA. The source for the first simcity was released in 2008, back when MS was still calling GPL and Linux cancer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(1989_video_game)#Micr...

Can't wait for MS to learn from EA and open source Windows 95.

Microsoft did open source 1983's DOS: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS

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.

Well, the first thing I thought while reading this was that it would have been great if Microsoft had released the source code of Age of Empires with the release of the Definitive Edition, as well as considered a LAN mode.

Unfortunately, while AoE2:DE is an awesome game, they have done neither…

Good thing that there are projects like OpenAge going on!

id Software, a much smaller company, open sourced the source code of almost all their games and ported them to operating systems known not to be profitable. The benefits of those altruistic decisions are simply unmeasurable. They did all this while still having to work an insane amount of hours to ship their ambitious products.

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.

In this vein, Frictional Games (Amnesia The Dark Descent) released their first game and game engine.

https://github.com/FrictionalGames

And Warzone 2100 http://wz2100.net/

https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

EA has a few things open sourced.

They don't want long-lived games. They want you to buy new games

... or semi-long-lived games you keep being squeezed for until they shut off the servers, as is the current fad.

You have to ask, "what would it hurt?".

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.

They wouldn't be able to discourage private servers. Unquestionably legitimate private servers have a huge advantage over the official, for-pay server.

Beyond goodwill – which imho would likely be relatively minor given what the average gamer cares about – open-sourcing in the hopes of stimulating mod support is a very cool idea. It looks like EA is providing a map editor, but having the DLLs out there makes it more possible for dedicated users to really tinker with game logic and internals, and (hopefully) create the kind of ongoing sophisticated DLC for other players that EA isn't willing to create and sell itself.

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.

> EA is providing a map editor

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.

Anyone remember the v2 rashdown map that someone made which became popular online? Bottleneck at either side, tanks through the middle, Tesla towers and v2 rockets to shoot over the rocks.

Seems like now there should be a universal map format and then a compiler to target different backends. I know each engine has its own capabilities and bugs, but it would be sweet to be able create a level using a universal format and run on unreal, unity, quake3, etc.

This goes at least as far back as Doom/Quake/Wolf3D(?) from ID software. Literal decades before MS started opening things.

> And then us gamers get more long-lived games as a benefit as well.

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.

> learn from Microsoft

Apparently, Microsoft is now the exemplary open source hero. Previous to them, there was none other to learn from.

Of course not, but I think Microsoft is the biggest example of a huge company turning around from "open source is cancer" to "let's try to do open source for some things".

I'm sure there are more examples of companies embracing open source after previously looking down on it, maybe you have some names handy?

It's not important what any other company has done. Motivations and end goal is. Microsoft's embrace might be a vampire's.

Long term, the involvement of companies like Microsoft in OSS and OSS communities might be damaging, not beneficial.

Microsoft embracing things is definitely not a good thing. There are plenty of reasons to put irrelevant stuff on their very own Github, but altruism is very down on that list when it comes to enterprise, especially Microsoft. Fool me once and all that. Microsoft might be pioneering the wolf in sheep clothing model, but I for one, better liked the honest, openly hostile approach.

I'm going to reconsider my point when everyone can compile their own fork of Windows and Office.

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