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Comment by Jetrel | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, most likely the only "open source" stuff that's got legal issues there would be GPL stuff - a large set to be sure, but not the full umbrella of "open source".

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GPL requires providing of game source files to end users. You can just publish your sources on a server, e.g. GitHub, and be done with that.

with GPL it very much matters which GPL, since v3 is explicitly about restricting that.

My understanding is that the licencing of the console SDKs and their associated NDAs is so restrictive that you're not allowed to publish source code using their APIs. Depending on the GPL version you may be able to get away with publishing the source minus the console-specific parts.

Why is this still the case? What is the advantage for console manufacturers to have restricted APIs which you need an NDA to access?

Console manufacturers don't want consoles to be usable for general-purpose computing (e.g. web servers and supercomputers), because they're selling at below commodity prices (as a loss-leader) and making them usable for G-P C would just cause everyone to buy them until they raised in price to commodity levels.

This has happened previously, with PS3's OtherOS feature, so it's a very real concern.

There are technicalities that make it a problem, because the copy coming directly from the game store might have restrictive license terms attached, even though the source and more is fully available elsewhere.

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