Does the open source community hurts game developers?

Sounds like the problem starts with Linux gamers who want to develop games.
I've never understood the point-of-view where everything HAS to be open-source and free just because Linux is.

Even at this point I love Linux so much I would actually pay for it.
I totally agree with Daerandin because people who have creative talent should be able to make a living off of it.
So we should pay them for it. This is why I love Kickstarter because developers who don't have the money up-front can ask the community to donate.

Free games are great and some companies have a genius business model where advertising pays for the game instead of the players.

Open source is great as well because people like us can learn how to develop games by looking at the actual code from successful games. There is no common sense to keep asking a developer to release the code if they don't want to. Specially if there is no benefit to the developer.

I definitely see the benefits of open-source code to the communities. If "Joe" knows how to program and can create a mod/patch/custom content for the game then the players get some benefits from it. But not the developer.

Sometimes I wish some older games code would be released so "mr enthusiast" can patch up the game or even port it to Linux. That would be kinda cool. Specially games that publishers are no longer making money from.
I think that is the idea GOG.com had and are reviving many old games.

Not an easy question, and I have experience as a developer (though not in games). I spent 15 years in the medical industry writing enterprise-class server software (big iron stuff).

First, we have to realize that there are different markets with different requirements. I'm not thinking here so much in the sense of 'Business' vs. 'Consumer' but more along the lines of applications that require maintenance contracts and applications that don't.

If an application requires me to spend x every year for a support agreement in order to continue using the app (essentially an ongoing license fee) then I think I should have the source code. I'm paying for support, so YOU should have to earn my business by the quality of support you provide, NOT because you have me locked into a contract on a proprietary system with no documentation using a data format that no-one else can read, or that at the very least will require me to spend exorbitant amounts of money to reverse engineer so that I can move away from your system. That's just evil.

Note that doesn't necessarily mean open source, but it DOES mean that I should have an agreement that says I get a copy of the source code, to use and modify as I see fit, so long as I don't distribute it (at the very least).

For anything else, I paid my money, I got a product that did what it said on the tin, then I'm happy.

There are corner cases, like the games we deal with here, where "Gee it'd be nice if this game ran on the OS that I use". Unfortunately, those things will always exist, and the only way around that is to open-source everything so that it can be ported if someone wants to. In principle that's great, but in practice we come back to the whole "Living costs money". People need to know that they can expect to feed themselves and their dependents if they invest significant labor in something.

In the end, though, the final decision to open source or not is up to the developer. The decision to pay money or not is ours as the consumer. In most cases, there's no real right or wrong in either of those choices, and the open-source zealots who try to paint it that way are IMO doing a disservice to the Open Source Movement.

Slightly different example, but the recent news of the 9 year old gaping hole in GNUTLS highlights that open source doesn't necessarily make things better, and can actually make things much worse. I can also understand that things like copyright licensing can make opensource a complete nightmare to navigate - if someone releases the source code for a game as open source but none of the resources (gfx, sound etc) are provided, how useful is that? Perhaps that's one way a developer could release a game as open source but still be able to make some money? I suspect that there'd be a cry about abusing open source though. For someone trying to understand how code works, it might be still helpful. However, in my experience, it takes a fair bit of work to get familiar with a code base, so it's still not an easy thing to do.

That's not a reason for or against open source.

But the point is, at least it WAS found, and once found it was fixed. How many security holes are there in closed source applications? More crucially, how many of those can we find and fix ourselves?

You're right that open source doesn't guarantee quality, any more than closed source does. What open source DOES guarantee is that I at least have access to the code so I can check things for myself.

I do wonder if there was a hole that size in a closed source library (like schannel) how quickly would it be found? People seem to like attacking closed source, especially from certain vendors. That doesn't mean open source or closed source has less or more issues.

And did you check the code? If you had checked the code, would you have noted that

Code:

    result = _gnutls_x509_get_signed_data (cert->cert, "tbsCertificate",
                                    &cert_signed_data);
    if (result < 0)
        {
        gnutls_assert ();
        goto cleanup;
        }
    result = 0;
cleanup:
    // cleanup type stuff
    return result;

wasn't actually correct and was returning a value of 0 if the CA wasn't valid to a function that was expecting a negative to indicate an error.

From my perspective if the answers to those questions is "no", then having access to the code hasn't really helped you. Although GnuTLS is "only" 138KLoc, cert handling and crypto tends towards code that's harder to understand.

I won't be taking sides either since I'm just an end-user. i'm at the mercy of the development teams and publishers.
Instead I will support both...
When there is open source and communities thrive from it, I'll encourage others to use it (Linux hint, hint)
When there is closed source and it runs great, I'll support it by purchasing their programs.

That way everyone is happy

Agreed, stipulated, accepted, stapled. We've already covered this.

Did I check the code? No. Was it therefore of practical benefit to me that I had access to the code? In this instance, no.

But that's the point: IN THIS INSTANCE.

The whole premise of open source is that if I choose to do so, I CAN look at the source. You seem to be arguing that since I didn't look at it open source has no value, which entirely misses the point.

I'll quite happily agree with you all day long that open source doesn't guarantee better code quality, better security, or better product. That's not the point; that's a side issue.

The one thing, the ONLY thing that open source guarantees is that, WHEN I NEED to look at the source code, I CAN.