charlie {l Wrote}:Of course, the worry [which is a hypothetical one, because it hasn't ever happened yet] is that you start making money with a game - because the game is good - and start to attract attention. Big Evil Brand X then comes along, some suit at some board meeting presents your game and says, "Hey we can make money without doing any development!" BEBX then rebrands and markets your game.
Now, this may or may not be likely, but it is the fear any indie developer will have when it comes to going open source. Of course, it could be looked at in a different light (there's no such thing as bad publicity) in that eventually BEBX will be villified for this tactic whilst the original developer benefits from the extra mindshare it generates.
Umm no, it's far more likely it's technically people who want say their friends to play the game, but their friends don't want to pay so the technical people will release it for free. An example is
Silverex. XChat 2 was too hard to maintain for Windows so the guy applied some proprietary patches to it and sold it. Silverex took the source code a while later as they liked the client and released a version for Windows for free. I don't know of a single person who paid for XChat, they all just used the Silverex version (both have now been succeeded by the community-developed
HexChat, which is fully free - XChat just wasn't turning a profit!).
I can guarantee you this would have happened anyway. As long as they have the source code and can share builds freely, they
will give away your product at zero cost. And you can do nothing about it.
But I don't think BEBX would do that, because they are probably smart enough to foresee people making a free version too. And many lawsuits if they decide to close the source code.
Open source works great for the server market where your customers know what they're doing and really need
support and stuff. It's great for SaaS too, as hosted instances are just more convenient to work with and set up. But for monetising compiled or in some way
downloaded desktop software... you can forget it. A rare exception is the Google Play Store. Android development is a black box to many people and compiling code for your phone or whatever doesn't have lots of documentation for it. Or at least, I don't have a clue about how it works, while all programs for the desktop (Linux/Mac/Windows) generally have thorough compilation instructions and all that. So in consequence there are some open source applications that are sold for money in the Play Store. Still, as I said, the more of a 'black box' development is, the more likely people are to be dissuaded to simply download the source and build your program for nothing.
The only place where it really can work for the end-user market (as opposed to technical) is games, actually. You can keep the art proprietary and open the source code. I can't see many people donating free time to a for-profit product (we'll have to ask
qubodup about how it turned out for him), but it's the only feasible option if you don't want someone to just make a free version.
The above out of the way, if you intended to make a freeware game anyway (like the 0 A.D. people, and most modders in general), you have nothing at all to lose by making it open source - in fact, you only stand to gain!