Factorio Forums

Hello,

question for the developers: are you considering opening the source code?

I noticed there are many techy people around here, who could actually put some effort into fixing some bugs. Options are up to you, I just think it might help with dev speed. You might, for example, just open source the 'game' part, keeping the custom engine to yourself. That would protect your business while people could contribute...

Hmm?

The game is in development, of course there are bugs. But this bugs will be fixed in the future, there is no need in additional developers for this.
Open source has some disadvantages, especially for games you have to buy and projects with multiplayer (hacks and stuff).

I could understand if the the developer don't want to make the project open source.

Nova wrote:Open source has some disadvantages, especially for games you have to buy and projects with multiplayer (hacks and stuff).

I believe, that the best way to avoid hacking is to have the sources open.

But there are other problems with the open way of doing it. It would need longer discussion.

On my opinion opensourcing the game right now from start would be bad idea. Why? As soon as you do this you can forget about earning much money with it. And since some members of development team quit their regular jobs to work on this game I hardly doubt they would be OK with this since it would ment that they no longer have a way to earn money for living.

But developers can still look after the moders to see if any of them might be suitable candidate to join their team some day. I have seen similar aproach with several other Indie games.

SilverWarior wrote:On my opinion opensourcing the game right now from start would be bad idea. Why? As soon as you do this you can forget about earning much money with it. And since some members of development team quit their regular jobs to work on this game I hardly doubt they would be OK with this since it would ment that they no longer have a way to earn money for living.

But developers can still look after the moders to see if any of them might be suitable candidate to join their team some day. I have seen similar aproach with several other Indie games.

I agree, Open Source once the game version 1.0 is out a while is enough.

The main problem with open source is this.
I can imagine situation, where we spend 3 man/years of developing this game, and make it opensource, few people will add few things and suddenly, people will feel like this became some kind of "public property".

What are the differences between opening the source, and somebody decompiling the game?
Does opening the source "allow" (real) modding??

ficolas wrote:Does opening the source "allow" (real) modding??

It would and it wouldn't.
It would allow to change the game much more ofcourse, but the current modding support we are making is aiming for the ability to stack more mods at the same time with minimal changes for conflicts.
By having sources and making different versions, you can hardly stack different mods made this way.

ficolas wrote:What are the differences between opening the source, and somebody decompiling the game?
Does opening the source "allow" (real) modding??

The biggest difference is that decompiling the game is treated as ilegal.
And the biggest problem of opensource is that unles everything is vell organized it can quickly came to confilcts becouse one ans changes can couse other parts of game to not work any more. This would finally lead to multiple incompatible branches.
Just take a look at Linux. How many editions are there? All the great number of Linux editions there are is only becouse pepole didn't manage to organize properly.

Linux is a perfect example: Linus wrote the hole kernel in some month by himself. When he released it, he had a working system. If he had released that before, everybody would worked on it and we would never got a Linux.

Linux as a bad example of opensource? I think you are the first one to claim that.
If that was really "linux as-in linux-kernel": There is only one release branch of linux.
(Well..Except for mangled and mutilated versions put up by hardware vendors who don't understand opensource)
If that was actually "linux as-in linux-distributions": Those all exist because of specific demands of individual user groups.

Ahhh... No. I meant that it is sometimes better to have open and sometimes closed source.

MF- wrote:Linux as a bad example of opensource? I think you are the first one to claim that.

No I'm not the first one to claim that. While nowadays this is rarely mentioned but a few years ago when Linux started branching internet was full of articles saying that such approach makes Linux as bad OS. This was mostly becouse there was so many significant differences between distrubutions that as developer you had to make quite a few code modifications for your program to be able to run on all of them.
Nowadays this is not so much of a problem as the major differences between distributions have decreased. Also nowadays developments of seperate distributions are much more organized as they were a few years back.
So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Linux is a bad OS. Sure there are some terible distributions but then again we also have terible Windows editions

All I want to say is that poorly organized opensourced project can quickly lead to different development branches and incompatible editions. Now you wouldn't want to have several different Factorio editions would you?

As I expected.
You are not talking about Linux itself, but about all the available variety of Linux-based operating systems and branches of open userspace code found in them.
I am sure there are people who actively seek a distribution incompatible with non-open software.
(When I think about it - one of the positive sides is also, that any malware either does not work, or is forced to go opensource and compile on the spot)

Linux is open source, and it is also free source, I there is where my doubt came from.

ficolas wrote:Linux is open source, and it is also free source

No, it's not free, it uses gpl. Free means, everybody can do, what he wants. They call it free, cause its more free than selling it.

And btw. I think this is more or less senseless (perhaps more), it's like discussion about the weather in the next weeks: we cannot decide it.

ssilk wrote:

ficolas wrote:Linux is open source, and it is also free source

No, it's not free, it uses gpl. Free means, everybody can do, what he wants. They call it free, cause its more free than selling it.

And btw. I think this is more or less senseless (perhaps more), it's like discussion about the weather in the next weeks: we cannot decide it.

I dont really care about factorio source, I dont know c++, just java and a bit of lua, I just didnt know about that stuff.
(yes I know java and I dont know anything about copyrights and so :/ )

The thread is pretty old and my "information" is also not the newest, but I think it just fits in this thread:

kovarex in [url=https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1374]Random Ramblings #4[/url] wrote:P.S. We are considering opening the source code to some people.

Just wanted to share this information with you and ask a question: Has that be done or did you choose not to share the source code?

It has been done.

Do you want to exchange some informations about that (why, who...) or do you want to keep that secret (for whatever reason)?
Is it possible to "apply" for the code?