Comment by pocketarc
11 hours ago
Your game example is a great one: If a game didn’t come with its 3D models, sound, level files, game data, or assets of any kind, but its engine was open source, I don’t think anyone would say “hey this game is open source”. They’d say the engine is, but that’s it. All of the above things are not code, but they are part of a game and yes, expected to be included in an open source game.
People refer to games with proprietary assets as open source all the time. The source code is open - the assets are not. For one example: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/blob/...
Source as a word has a meaning that doesn't include non-source things.
That’s an open source engine, we already have a word to define what that is.
And we have Open Weights to define what those are.
No, an engine is only the code that is shared between games. For instance "urban terror" by frozen sands is a closed source game on top of a (now) open source engine (the Quake3 engine). Quake3 is a (now) open source game (with closed assets) on top of its own open source engine. Quake and it's derivatives are a particularly nice example of the distinction between a game and its engine because the engine includes an interpreter for the game code, leaving a very clear boundary. Meanwhile many games end up intermingling their engine and game code (e.g. see the Eve Online devs write about this - another closed source game on top of a now open source engine).
BAR is an open source game. All the game source is open.
2 replies →
Doom pioneered this model, the Doom engine was open-sourced while the assets remained proprietary. This is where projects like Freedoom exist, to create an entirely free software equivalent.
I think this misses the point I was trying to make. Both an open source game and an open weights LLM include the necessary assets. But people seem to be saying, “you need everything that was used to create the assets”. For game art, that would include sketches, prior art used as inspiration, project files that aren’t used by the game engine but were used during the design process, and so on - if you apply the same standard. But I don’t think anyone does.
Similar to this I've never seen a project request anyone license their github PR comments under any license whatsoever even though they're undoubtedly copyrighted and used in the creation of the actual source code.