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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's any particular secret sauce in the AGI engine, such that competitors would benefit from a leak. There are probably other examples I can't think of, but Hugo's House of Horrors was basically an AGI-style game made by one guy just a few years later.

Beyond the initial novelty of a graphical adventure, Sierra games worked because they put a ton of effort into creating those graphics and actually writing the game. The tech isn't nothing, but it's a small fraction of the end product.

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Information and useful example code were much harder to acquire in those days. Learning to build working software was immensely harder than today because there was nothing to build on. There was almost no meaningful open source on MS-DOS, and certainly no open source game engines.

In that environment a widespread leak of the AGI source might have been significant, at least as an inspiration that would have provided a blueprint of exactly how these most popular PC games of the era were made.

I sometimes wonder if leaked source code has any value, especially code like that that doesn't contain secrets that could be taken advantage of by hackers (ex: keys, backdoors, ...).

The leak obviously doesn't come with any license, so you can't reuse that code for your own products, at least not if you don't want to get sued. So it means that in order to take advantage of the code for your own work, you need to read it, understand the techniques, and apply them to your own work in a way that doesn't smell like copyright infringement. More often than not, it is harder to do than going from scratch, and in cases it is advantageous, how often will you get a real competitive advantage?

Developers often write code from scratch even when they could use open source code that is well documented and with a permissive license. Reading code is often harder than writing it. Even just rebuilding it may be challenging.

It may facilitate piracy, but barely, games often got cracked and distributed within days, and the copy protection may not even be part of the source code.

If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft now owns all of the old Sierra IP (if I'm not mistaken, the chain of custody was: Sierra -> CUC -> Cendant -> Havas -> Vivendi Universal -> Activision Blizzard -> Microsoft) and I wouldn't expect Microsoft to sue over old source code to a 40-year old game engine with a graphics resolution of 160x200. In fact, given that they've been gradually opening source code for DOS from the same era, they might even be convinced to make an official release of it.

If they still have the full/ original source, which is a big if.

Sounds like the words of someone that grew up in the era of "not having to write ASM or C to get something done"

You had probably multiples orders of magnitude less people that could even speak the language, let alone do something coherent with it.

The learning rate of your internal neural net was still dialed up near max, vs. today, where it's rapidly decreasing and thus things you're exposed to aren't nearly as capable of shaping your internal weights.

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