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It depends on how the code is structured. It might be that the licensed parts are sprinkled throughout the functions, or that they would have to reorganize thin

It depends on how the code is structured. It might be that the licensed parts are sprinkled throughout the functions, or that they would have to reorganize things to not reveal too much about a specific NDA'd technology (like a console SDK)... The resulting code might end up being just as useless as no code at all, and I assume it would be very hard to get the management to allocate resources for that.

account42 2y ago
Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions. And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion.
- xienze 2y ago
  > Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions. You’d think so, but some developers have a very adversarial relationship with abstractions, such as abstracting away platform-specific code behind a common interface. It happens more often than you’d think. > And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion. So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? And what’s stripped out may have very important technical considerations that might only be known based on which function calls were yanked out.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? I think that in general, potential open source developers would not care at all about that. Some code (that doesn't yet work) is better than no code. As someone else mentioned, a motivated open source group could probably easily fill in all the missing gaps within a month.

account42 2y ago

Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions. And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion.

xienze 2y ago
> Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions. You’d think so, but some developers have a very adversarial relationship with abstractions, such as abstracting away platform-specific code behind a common interface. It happens more often than you’d think. > And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion. So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? And what’s stripped out may have very important technical considerations that might only be known based on which function calls were yanked out.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? I think that in general, potential open source developers would not care at all about that. Some code (that doesn't yet work) is better than no code. As someone else mentioned, a motivated open source group could probably easily fill in all the missing gaps within a month.