From the article: Kitfox said that it has “no access to the source code, and will have no influence on the design, programming, or updates to Dwarf Fortress.”

From the article: Kitfox said that it has “no access to the source code, and will have no influence on the design, programming, or updates to Dwarf Fortress.” Interesting approach, they're basically making a commercial client for the DF "server". From what I know of Dwarf Fortress mods, even though tile sets and data definitions are data driven, a lot of the functionality is hard-coded, so many mods\viewers work by reverse engineering and reading or modifying memory at run-time. Indeed looking at the Dwarf Therapist code this seems to be the case still (https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/master/share/memory_layouts/ https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/mast...). With a commercial release with Steam Workshop support and no source access for the primary developers does that mean DF will get a proper mod system? Steam is likely to bring in a lot of new users that don't necessarily have the patience to deal with "truths" the existing community has been dealing with for 14 years...