Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>A friend explained to me that the real benefit of foss is the community building huge things together, faster and better than any individual.

Any example of a highly successful video game developed from start as open source by the community as opposed to a company releasing their source code for free after launching a game?

View on HN

The only ones I'm familiar with that people actually play for reasons other than the novelty/political statement of playing a FOSS game are ASCII roguelikes (most notably Nethack) and a menagerie of remakes of commercial games that have now surpassed the originals in features, graphics, and system compatibility (OpenTTD, OpenXCOM, etc.)

Not sure what qualifies as 'highly successful', 'from the start', etc. but Mindustry[0] is GPL, is actively updated, accepts and includes contributions from third parties and is available commercially.

[0] https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry

Also it's fun, addicting, and pretty polished.

Space station 13 is the best example.

It technically started closed source, but has been open source with countless forks existing in parallel for at least 90% of its lifetime.

AFAIK, SS13 had a number of source code leaks that resulted in popular forks as well. Not exactly the spirit of FOSS.

Not really. No servers based off of leaked source code have really lasted - they get nuked by the larger community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com