I wish the platform would've been more open, but I know there are many other similar platforms now.
I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong.
Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the project they'll release the source code for the community to keep it alive.
There are a lot of game engine like projects on Github with full code available that are anything but easily runnable on modern operating systems.
this has nothing to do with feeling entitled to get things for free, it's more an internal feeling that computing has divided itself into an interesting and vibrant ecosystem of open source software, and proprietary products that are in some sense the equivalent of a neighbourhood diner - they might actually be very nice, and are surely of interest to people who live in said neighbourhood, but they are never going to be relevant to me in any real way. being closed just sucks all the excitement out of things - i can, as you say, sit back and enjoy it the way i would a piece of art, but i can't summon up any enthusiasm about using it.
(if there were a book about it i would totally buy and read that, though; i do enjoy the fact of its existence and the community around it, and stories about its development and growth continue to be fascinating.)
Except if the book wasn't open source then it "suck all the excitement out of things?
Do you refuse to play all games that aren't open source? Don't watch movies unless they are open source?
There isn't much to Pico-8 in terms of runtime. The LUA you write is yours and I'm confident if you really wanted to use it somewhere else it wouldn't take more then a few days to repo the features. There just isn't that much there. A few draw commands, some input, and audio functions. What's to lose?
The entire package, loaders, editors, exporters, etc is a lot of work but you're no losing anything by writing games in it.
If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8 would just be a regular old game framework: features would get added and added until it was just like any other game library.
As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day. That's the "fantasy" part!
That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs are just "feature-limited game libraries"!
Personally, I'd both like to see and open-source way to play back pico-8 cartridges and lexaloffle continuing to be financially rewarded for building a pretty cool (and cheap!) platform, so I hope the graphics and sound editors won't be included in free clones anytime soon.
https://liko-12.github.io/ (lua, open source, I haven't used this much, but it seems nice)
https://github.com/ftsf/nico (nim, open source. Not quite the same as the others, there's no IDE, etc. But it's a library with an API similar to PICO)