This just seems like a lazy excuse. Ok so some of the code can’t be released. Fine, what stops you from open sourcing the rest of it that isn’t licensed? The OS community will surely fill in The blanks.
So they could probably do it, but it would be costly, while just releasing the TF2 code is basically free.
You’d think so, but some developers have a very adversarial relationship with abstractions, such as abstracting away platform-specific code behind a common interface. It happens more often than you’d think.
> And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion.
So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? And what’s stripped out may have very important technical considerations that might only be known based on which function calls were yanked out.
I think that in general, potential open source developers would not care at all about that. Some code (that doesn't yet work) is better than no code. As someone else mentioned, a motivated open source group could probably easily fill in all the missing gaps within a month.
It's all legal risk with little commercial upside
I do think that the source code of source was leaked. Its just that valve has to themselves give the code of source. FLOSS community would really do it. Trust me.
Modders in general won't care though.