Judging by this communities uncanny ability to rip games and twist them into their own "creation", I have doubts that making Byond open source would be....beneficial for the software.

Might just be stemming from a sense of worry, but I have seen open source projects in the past, especially in this community, adopt a singular programmer, who in most cases, has scared away the "competition", and managed to claim the credit and rewards for themselves.

Just feels like a bad idea at the moment. Might end up with DragonByondZeta, Byond las noches, or Bynaruto.

Coming from opinion and experience, I've seen people work very passionately on something, something that isn't there's, that they have no legal right to. Which is usually where some of the trouble arises in my example. They feel attached to a project and proud and will defend it fiercely even when in the wrong. I doubt Byond needs or wants that sort of drama from being open source. Call it unnecessary paranoia or worry if you will, that's fine. I've just got a strong feeling about opensource being a bad idea in the current community climate.

You're also making a lot of flawed assumptions. Here are some:

• The same kind of people capable of stealing and maintaining (LOL) the source code of a project amounting to a couple thousand lines in a friendly language like DM are going to take and maintain a substantially larger code-base on a substantially larger project requiring substantially more domain technical knowledge in a substantially more complex programming language.
  • Good luck with that.
• The open-sourced project would have permissive licensing, or that it need be open-sourced at all.
  • For example, if Lummox released the source(s) under the GPLv3 license, rebranded spin-offs would have to comply with that license model.
  • My suggestion was to keep it closed-source and add contributors, because that is a much smaller leap for Lummox to make. I obviously think the open-source model would be best, for the platform and for his business. In the closed-source model, these contributors could sign non-disclosure agreements and/or non-compete agreements.
  • Whereas stealing someone else's intellectual property (DBZ, Naruto, ...) and subsequently having that stolen offers little room for legal recourse, that is not the case for stealing from a legitimate business.
• More would be lost from people trying to compete with BYOND's business model than would be gained from people contributing to BYOND's growth.
  • SSJHOKAGESHINIGAMIDUDE forks the BYOND repo, makes a few changes, purchases hosting and a domain name and launches his new BYOND Zeta platform. How many people do you think are going to leave the established platform that the community and Lummox are maintaining in favor of the new one? Two? Yeah, two: the "creator" and one hype-boy. But they'll be back anyway.
• Competition is bad.
  • This is untrue.

These ideas are very bad and backwards. Regressive ideas like this are why BYOND can't grow. This is an out of touch echo chamber that doesn't know what the real players of byond want.

People want to play what they want to play, not what you want them to play. It is not a game engine's place to tell you what you can make or play.

Tens of DU wrote:

Just one example of so many problems on BYOND that an overwhelming amount of the players get annoyed by.

So much wrong about this. There is no reason to think that this is even approximately a random sample of BYOND users, given that it's only nine hours old and does not seem to have been posted anywhere else on BYOND (as far as I can tell). Most likely, this is non-representative and simply opinions of the playerbase of your game about how the game should be. As such, there's very good reason to think that it would be biased.

Also, if we assume that there are 200 users of your game, that ends up representing a 14% margin of error, which is pretty bad. That means that in reality, your poll could only mean that only 3 in 4 agree with a change, or that every user agrees to the change.

This is an out of touch echo chamber that doesn't know what the real players of byond want.

It's funny how when you post, it seems like you're always apparently talking for the REAL BYONDers, and also interesting how apparently those interests always align with your own.

It is not a game engine's place to tell you what you can make or play.

1. Considering the way copyright law and licensing works, it literally can be the engine's decision to do that, if they really want to.
2. When the products produced can cause legal trouble for the engine, it becomes their place to do exactly that (i.e., trying to cause less harm to come to themselves).

I agree. But the webplayer does not work with my game and Standalone is not for fangames, so without a hub there is nowhere else to go. My interest in DragonBall is pretty much gone and I want to repurpose the source into a "generic anime-style game" so it can have original lore & ideas in it instead of being trapped as DragonBall. But that's another story.