drummyfish {l Wrote}:The answer is a license wouldn't be required for a SW to be free, but source availability wouldn't automatically make it a free SW. Always ask whether the 4 freedoms are guaranteed IN PRACTICE.
The 4 freedoms aren't only the question of law, you can have a SW with a free license that isn't free in practice (e.g. because it's purposefully overcomplicated so that in practice hardly anyone can study it, modify it or even compile it).
I've defiantly seen some of that. It is like people work hard to make the whole thing "harder" to work with and modify. That is why I really like the philosophy of suckless games, not that I always make things suckless, but it is definitely something to strive for, rather than making things like "dependency hunt" or "you have to do a bunch of complicated obscure stuff to modify the game" None the less, a lot of proprietary games get mods in spite of the horrid system that can include things like hex-editing, reverse engineering, rewriting the entire codebase, stuffing assets into obscure formats etc etc, not that free software doesn't have its horrors too. Part of it is definitely a "business model" thing, "only I can understand it, or very few people can so modders are harder to find." but also because of "look at me, I learned a bunch of new stuff such as learning this trending library no one knows how to use, its already outdated, but your distro is using an even older version, too bad you can't make it work, that isn't the point, the point is that I demonstrate my skill as a developer for employers, not actually make and ship a game.