Nethack source code was not closed and license was FOSS. Developers even accepted patches by email and from rec.games.roguelike newsgroup, but development was h

Nethack source code was not closed and license was FOSS. Developers even accepted patches by email and from rec.games.roguelike newsgroup, but development was highly centralized as only a small group of developers had access to commit history. You could always fork NetHack, like UnNetHack developers did, but you only had access to release tarballs and had to rebase against many changes at once. Maintaining unofficial patch series was not actively supported. That is what I call "closed development process". Another project with similar policy is OMNeT++ [0]. Simulation models are developed openly in the public [1], but the development of the kernel is done by closed group. Well, they also have restrictive license, forbidding commercial use, but what I am talking about is development model. If you look at UnNetHack repository [2], it is forked from unofficial "Vanilla NetHack" repository [3] that contains only 53 commits, one for each released tarball. Now, with access to official git repository, it will be possible to track the changes between releases. [0] https://omnetpp.org/ https://omnetpp.org/ [1] https://inet.omnetpp.org/Repository.html https://inet.omnetpp.org/Repository.html [2] https://github.com/UnNetHack/UnNetHack/commits/master https://github.com/UnNetHack/UnNetHack/commits/master [3] https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack