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The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding c

The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding communities. While development is centralised and you definitely don't have any kind of open source licence, collaboration is generally open in terms of releasing mods to the game. They also bash the Commons Clause purely using the definition (zero mention on why they think the restrictions are bad, it's just handled with "not OSI" and that's it) Of course this position can be understood better when you look at who are sponsoring this organisation. (in a short way, opensource.net is an OSI front, and OSI is lobbied heavily by the software industry)

RyanHamilton 3y ago
OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors
- Spivak 3y ago
  This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress from. OSI was founded by Perens and Raymond and very much represents the interests of the wider software industry. You're free to argue that at some point they have stopped in recent but Open Source has meant the same thing for going on 30 years.
  - Retric 3y ago
    OSI is from 1998 so it’s much younger than the open source movement. BSD was approaching 20 and Linux was what 7 years old at that point?
    - Spivak 3y ago
      The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.
      - Retric 3y ago
        The term still predates OSI, but more importantly than the name than what was going on. The specific transition from sharing as public-domain software vs free, open, shared, and permissivly licenced software dates to ~1953 with A-2 being provided for free and requesting updates be sent back to UNIVAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System Others might point to IBM SHARE from 1955 as being closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) Followed by many similar arrangements before the term open source was coined with OSI only showing up much later.
      - outop 3y ago
        No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.
        doctor_eval 3y ago
        My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry. Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t. I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses. So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward. Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    > Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors No, you are thinking of Free Software and copyleft, which predates Open Source. Open Source was invented as an alternative to Free Software.
  - RyanHamilton 3y ago
    Please reread my post, I didn't mention anything historical. I never said who founded it nor who started it. Your arguing against a straw man argument you made up. I am saying today, OSI does not represent the software industry and that given sponsorship bias it's likely to represent the views of those companies that pay OSI.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Bloomberg, Capital One, Cisco, Intel, Meta and Red Hat all are sponsoring at the same level as GitHub. FerretDB, Perforce, Tidelift and Salesforce join Microsoft at the next level down. That's a much more diverse crowd of sponsors than I thought I'd see based on your comment.
Macha 3y ago
Note that it's subscription/service games that often have the most contentious relation with their modding scenes, as they tend to see the mods more as competition. On the other hand, people are generally more willing to develop mods for software sold with perpetual licenses, as the chances of no longer having access to the thing you are supporting is much lower than with e.g. $XXXXX/month cloud services.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Very good point, not only in live service games... I've seen a thing or two and it's usually obvious how developers treat the modding community. In some games they are viewed as an asset (people mod my game, they make it different, this attracts more people to buy my game) and in other games, modders are the scum who always want to cheat/commit "fraud" by not wanting to buy all the microtransaction slop/etc.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Even for perpetual license games, if the game has paid DLC the developers often see mods and cheatengine as a threat to their revenues. Capcom is on the record that this is part of why they put DRM and anticheat into their single-player games now, because otherwise you can get items and cosmetics with cheatengine instead of buying them off Steam/PSN/XBL
Buttons840 3y ago
Modding games seems like a legal grey area. Permission hasn't been granted, but also, game developers already have your money and they know a lot of players would be unhappy if they tried to stop the modding.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  I wouldnt be surprised if most game studio didn't enjoy it/try to promote it in maybe indirect ways. Skyrim is an old game, great game, but an old game. However modding keeps it fresh and interesting and I would imagine it probably is a big reason why they still get sales on it. While it isn't a huge money maker any more, they are still selling copies just for people to play with the mods, extending the timeline of how much revenue the game will create over it's total lifetime.

RyanHamilton 3y ago

OSI isn't the software industry. It's sponsored by Google, amazon then ms via github in order of sponsor donations. It's financed by the hyperscalars. https://opensource.org/sponsors https://opensource.org/sponsors

Spivak 3y ago
This is such a crazy retelling of history that it's hard to take seriously. Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors -- namely Microsoft and Oracle, and to prevent people from imposing their will on users via software in a manner that users had no possible redress from. OSI was founded by Perens and Raymond and very much represents the interests of the wider software industry. You're free to argue that at some point they have stopped in recent but Open Source has meant the same thing for going on 30 years.
- Retric 3y ago
  OSI is from 1998 so it’s much younger than the open source movement. BSD was approaching 20 and Linux was what 7 years old at that point?
  - Spivak 3y ago
    The free software movement is for sure older than that but I can't find any verifiable source of "open source" being used in its current form earlier than the 90's.
    - Retric 3y ago
      The term still predates OSI, but more importantly than the name than what was going on. The specific transition from sharing as public-domain software vs free, open, shared, and permissivly licenced software dates to ~1953 with A-2 being provided for free and requesting updates be sent back to UNIVAC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System Others might point to IBM SHARE from 1955 as being closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) Followed by many similar arrangements before the term open source was coined with OSI only showing up much later.
    - outop 3y ago
      No, because it's a name that was made up then to try to rebrand something that had already existed for decades, but which has a name that those guys didn't like.
      - doctor_eval 3y ago
        My memory from the time was that the OSI was mostly about trying to characterise the various licenses that were floating around, and about legitimising the use of freeish software in industry. Today the majority of free software that I use seems to be Apache/BSD/MIT - and GPL for Linux - but back in the 90s everyone seemed to make up their own “free” license, and there was a lot of confusion around GPL. My recollection is that OSI was trying to create some clarity around which licenses really were “free”, and which weren’t. I was just a passive observer, I was not involved in any way, I wasn’t a fan of some of the players, and I even thought calling it OSI was pretentious - but nevertheless they made a dent in the universe by popularising the term “open source”. OSI was far more than a rebranding because it enabled us to speak about GPL - which imposes conditions on use - and free licenses like BSD in the same breath, while excluding what we now call “source available” licenses. So despite my misgivings, I think the OSI deserves credit. They stood up and did something meaningful, and helped move the entire software industry forward. Because of this, I think calling it a rebranding is totally unjustified and unfair.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > Open Source was not some brainchild of megacorps but very much so a mission of the wider software industry to band together to have an alternative to hugely expensive proprietary software vendors No, you are thinking of Free Software and copyleft, which predates Open Source. Open Source was invented as an alternative to Free Software.
- RyanHamilton 3y ago
  Please reread my post, I didn't mention anything historical. I never said who founded it nor who started it. Your arguing against a straw man argument you made up. I am saying today, OSI does not represent the software industry and that given sponsorship bias it's likely to represent the views of those companies that pay OSI.
lolinder 3y ago
Bloomberg, Capital One, Cisco, Intel, Meta and Red Hat all are sponsoring at the same level as GitHub. FerretDB, Perforce, Tidelift and Salesforce join Microsoft at the next level down. That's a much more diverse crowd of sponsors than I thought I'd see based on your comment.

Macha 3y ago

Note that it's subscription/service games that often have the most contentious relation with their modding scenes, as they tend to see the mods more as competition. On the other hand, people are generally more willing to develop mods for software sold with perpetual licenses, as the chances of no longer having access to the thing you are supporting is much lower than with e.g. $XXXXX/month cloud services.

Pannoniae 3y ago
Very good point, not only in live service games... I've seen a thing or two and it's usually obvious how developers treat the modding community. In some games they are viewed as an asset (people mod my game, they make it different, this attracts more people to buy my game) and in other games, modders are the scum who always want to cheat/commit "fraud" by not wanting to buy all the microtransaction slop/etc.
kevingadd 3y ago
Even for perpetual license games, if the game has paid DLC the developers often see mods and cheatengine as a threat to their revenues. Capcom is on the record that this is part of why they put DRM and anticheat into their single-player games now, because otherwise you can get items and cosmetics with cheatengine instead of buying them off Steam/PSN/XBL

Buttons840 3y ago

Modding games seems like a legal grey area. Permission hasn't been granted, but also, game developers already have your money and they know a lot of players would be unhappy if they tried to stop the modding.

tcmart14 3y ago
I wouldnt be surprised if most game studio didn't enjoy it/try to promote it in maybe indirect ways. Skyrim is an old game, great game, but an old game. However modding keeps it fresh and interesting and I would imagine it probably is a big reason why they still get sales on it. While it isn't a huge money maker any more, they are still selling copies just for people to play with the mods, extending the timeline of how much revenue the game will create over it's total lifetime.