Ignoring that most publishers will recoil in horror if you suggest open sourcing their product, there's two problems your post fails to address: 1. The game in

Ignoring that most publishers will recoil in horror if you suggest open sourcing their product, there's two problems your post fails to address: 1. The game industry is stuck on a "release and forget" model. Except for games designed up-front to have some recurring revenue component, few get more than a couple token patches after release. (There are lots of industry horror stories about studios that find out that they can't even compile a game anymore two years after release.) 2. Most games today rely on proprietary middleware, and the industry is steadily moving farther in that direction. Expecting anyone who wants to rebuild the game to pony up for a site license sounds like a nonstarter. In fact, even sharing information on the middleware is sometimes an NDA violation (everything related to consoles is shrouded in an absurd amount of secrecy) so the codebase might have to be scrubbed of all comments prior to release. I'm sure the games community will be thrilled. What I think we really need is for someone to revive the Loki model where a studio dedicates itself to publishing Linux ports of existing games. At this point, I'd be willing to pay a company like that a lump up-front fee for a game that includes, say, a year of bug fixes/upgrades, and some recurring fee after that for compatibility updates.