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Comment by lpapez | Hacker News Reader

As a younger dev I often dreamed of devs releasing the source code to ancient games so that I could learn from it, but now that I know how corporate works I've made my peace that it will happen rarely or never.

I bet that devs in a company like LucasArts these days need to wait for weeks on corporate to give permission to use a alternate email client, just imagine coming up with a proposal to abandon copyright claim on something. It just can't happen, you would have a very hard time even finding one single person inside the company who might actually have the authority and pull to greenlight it.

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It would be nice if it happened more often, but it does happen enough that there's a whole Wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

You don't need to abandon the copyright claim to release the source. It can be released under a license that prohibits any redistribution for example.

A proposal to open source will go to an SVP (or compatible) who will cover their ass by sending it to legal. They in turn will cover their asses and demonstrate their perceived worth by enumerating every possible risk however small. The SVP puts it in their "don't touch" pile.

Also, nobody within the corporation really benefits from the open sourcing. "I hopefully won some goodwill from nostalgic players" is not a thing you can put into your employee evaluation packet.

Fun fact, for a charity event Introversion released the source code for a collection of their old games. But they are also the opposite of big corporate.

Carmack’s release of quake comes to mind. I may misremember,…

Carmack was the textbook definition of rock star programmer and had a sizable portion of company ownership when they released doom/quake code, kinda hard to emulate that as a cog in the machine

Carmack is from a time when videogame budgets didn't rival Hollywood blockbusters.

You can study the reverse engineered code of a lot game engines. ScummVM is a massive collection of reverse engineered game engines, with the occasional donation of original game code from kind developers.

Publishing something doesn't mean you disclaim copyright over it.

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