A few games purposefully went FOSS instead of becoming abandoned. <br>There's a reason why people should embrace Free and Open Source software for core projects and encourage proprietary developers to release code years after a game has seen its success. <br>Heck... some games like Mindustry succeed while being FOSS. You can just straight up compile your own copy free of charge (not with Steam features though). The game is still making money. <br>People don't realize how far modders can take a game.,(reply>), I recently started playing Vangers, a 1998 game, which is now supported... By a group of volunteer programmers. And there are still servers and an active community. And they have source code. There are even guys trying to port the game. There is a browser port and a mobile port is said to be in development. Fascinating,(reply>), @NWDD archival is true. But at some point, some force of licensing much line mechanical licenses for songs to even attempt running the games rather than just being museum pieces would be necessary.<br>That delves more into copyright than licensing as it will have to go beyond companies when they either die or get bought up by conglomerates who just store IPs with no intention to use any time soon.,(reply>), @AshnSilvercorp I wholeheartedly agree, I wasn't intending to link government regulation to FOSS, sorry I conveyed it wrong.<br>I was referring specifically about government regulating the archival of videogames as a viable alternative to FOSS/source-availability.<br><br>I don't know how it's going in other jurisdictions but (for example) spain now requires archiving videogames through the national library when releasing them (I'm unsure what are the requirements for SaaS titles and it's still insufficient and weak as it doesn't require to provide an environment in which the game would work, but it's a first step that would have been nice to have a few decades ago).,(reply>), @NWDD So there's one thing you don't do when it comes to FOSS. Heavy regulation. It breaks the whole concept.<br>It's alright for games to find their own way to license, and how it's enforced also matters. I don't think every game should become FOSS. I'm more interested that they become that at EoL so the concept of EoL itself dies instead of the ideas people worked hard on.<br><br>But at no point will a whole community of people who want freedom of their core system ever tolerate direct government regulation of FOSS software, especially in the Linux realm.,(reply>), @Spectere  No, this is something that I've heard multiple people state over the years and GPL just isn't enough by far.<br><br>Not only there are many situations in which GPL just wouldn't be enough and AGPL would be required (servers) but it's also weak/non-battletested with stuff such as streaming titles, may weak trademarks if the purpose is to "allow doing cool stuff" and at the same time it just doesn't work for tools that would empower modding workflow but don't need to be shared to non-team members, not to mention that it puts smaller developers in a competitive disadvantage when compared to large studios that might not care if their source is up for grabs.<br><br>It's a great license that can be used by a lot of things but very non-generalizable to games when compared to other areas of development more focused on glue... I think that this is somewhat a common belief with developers working on different fields that have both very different requirements and very different competitive limitations (not unlike the belief that a debugger isn't needed when you have testing).