cancelJul 13, 2022

Unity (former game engine company) has merged with an actual adware and malware distribution company. That's not an exaggeration. Fake Flash installers, was blacklisted by Microsoft's anti-malware tool, VirusTotal entires, that kind of thing.

https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/

https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/

Don't build your games on engines you don't have the source code to.

Adware Empire - IronSource and InstallCore

A recent Adware campaign using malicious Bing ads led me to a Chrome download that eventually deployed Adware to the user’s computer. The IPs and types of Adware connected back to IronSource Ltd., Babylon Software Ltd., and InstallCore – all Israeli companies that have connections to Adware. See her

INFOSTRUCTION
Show threadtouch fluffy tailJul 13, 2022
damn if only someone had warned us about the dangers of proprietary software

imagine how different things could have been
Show threadcancelJul 13, 2022
@fluffy open source games are generally not economically viable because anyone can just rerelease your game for free
Show threadneo
@cancel @fluffy
that's not how it works, actually.
you can basically ruin someone's entire life for doing that if they don't at least asset flip everything, including the writing, since that's all intellectual property
Jul 13, 2022 at 6:42pmWeb
Show threadcancelJul 13, 2022
@neo @fluffy you’re talking about “open source engine but not the game content” which doesn’t count as “open source” by any of the “open source” groups. The assets etc all have to be open source, as well, otherwise they cannot be distributed with the other open source software.
Show threadneoJul 13, 2022
@cancel @fluffy
I don't know how to tell you this, but there are very very very few open source games for a reason. Even in an ideal world, most games would probably not be open source for at least a year or two after release
Show threadcancelJul 13, 2022
@neo @fluffy you’re agreeing with me.
Show threadneoJul 13, 2022
@cancel @fluffy
I don't like the way things are.
I think it's possible to release games as open source and have a healthy ecosystem.

Despite not actually releasing source, ZUN and the Touhou games are as good of an example as I think you'll find for how it could work in practice.

ZUN (nominally) owns the IP, but basically lets people play around to their hearts content
Show thread🍄🕷️🌺Jul 14, 2022

@cancel @neo @fluffy turns out that actually isn’t necessarily true for GPL (i struggled with this exact issue a couple years ago) - at least in a lot of commentary they do seem to make a distinction between code and content, cf. sprite fixes etc. that are included in GZDoom

it’s definitely not true for non-copyleft permissive licences

Show threadcancelJul 14, 2022
@apophis @neo @fluffy so if I'm wrong, why isn't DOOM available in Ubuntu's package manager (the whole game)