Comment by l0b0
6 hours ago
"GOG GALAXY is a long-lived product with a large and complex C++ codebase." Also known as a shitshow. Hopefully the new engineer(s) will be encouraged to at least add some tests and refactor things to stay sane.
No mention of a license, though. I guess it'll stay closed source.
> I guess it'll stay closed source.
It's a DRM implementation. It has to stay closed source.
There is no DRM on GOG.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
I guess depends what you consider DRM, some games appear to have problems
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/label_the_games_that_have_...
Last I checked, there is loads of DRM on GOG and most of the games that have it, force you to use Galaxy.
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And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Yet the standalone offline installed games won't run without libgalaxy.dylib (Mac) or Galaxy64.dll (Windows) which is responsible for outbound connections to https://galaxy-log.gog.com and https://insights-collector.gog.com?
To be clear: if you buy Disco Elysium on GOG, download the "offline game installer" without using Galaxy, install it, and run the game on a desert island, it will work (the network requests fail open). But if you try to run the game after removing the bundled dylib/DLL, it will not.
Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
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Famously so. The main method of deployment was an offline installer before they made Galaxy, and AFAIK Galaxy just downloads and runs the installer.
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Why? Can't DRM be implemented in open source, and only have private keys kept secret?
If we have DRM with some private key, then I guess your idea is I download the game files and some private key and that allows me to run the game.
If I can send you the private key and the game and it allows you to run the game with no further inputs, then the DRM is trivially broken (even without open source).
If it does some online check, then if the source is open we can easily make a version that bypasses the online check.
If there is some check on the local PC (e.g. the key only works if some hardware ID is set correctly), we can easily find out what it checks, capture that information, package it, and make a new version of the launcher that uses this packaged data instead of the real machine data.
If you use a private key to go online and retrieve more data, having it be open source makes it trivial to capture that data, package it, and write a new version of the launcher that uses that packaged data.
Basically, DRM requires that there is something that is not easy to copy, and it being open source makes it a lot easier to copy.
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This is factually incorrect. GOG famously has no DRM.
Try checking on the facts first. GOG famously has a slogan that says they have no DRM. They are lying in their slogan.