News Desura goes open source as Desurium

Digital distribution platform Desura is now - partially - open source, as Desurium.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/01/24/desura-goes-open-source/1

 

Amazing - great move by the company. At the end of the day nothing bad can come from this, only good!!

 

It might not be a silver bullet, but it's a good idea. As long as they follow through with the idea of merging improvements, I like it.

 

Hm. From my knowledge of the GPL, this could cause problems. If they're planning on maintaining an open source, and closed source tree (implied by the article), where Desura is a closed source version of Desurium with more features or whatever, they may run into problems. Chromium is licensed under the BSD license, which effectively lets you do anything with the code - that's why they can take all the features into the closed-source Chrome. On the other hand, Desurium will be licensed under GPLv3, so they won't be so lucky - it's fine for their own code, which they can easily change the licenses of, but for the code of others, they will either have to publish the source of Desura (ie making Desura, Desurium), or not use it at all.

Well, I tend to be fairly cynical on the whole, but I'm not sure I agree. The upside of this for Desura is that they'll have to pay less towards development costs.

The upside for the developers is that they've spent their time improving a piece of software which, as it stands, exists solely for the purpose of purchasing. It's equivalent to Scan or eBuyer open-sourcing their web software to try and get people to look for fixes - sure, you're improving software, but in the end they'd just do it themselves, so you're not gaining much. It's like cutting off your left ear to make cutting off your right slightly less painful.

Of course, if you just want a credible Steam alternative, it's probably a great thing to contribute to.

 

Brilliant. My biggest complaint about steam has always been how rigid their GUI is. As a bit of a coder myself, I love the idea of switching over to something I can readily modify and integrate into my other projects. Unfortunately I don't see a switch being feasible until the program gains popularity, and can contend with steam's social network.

 

Good luck to them, they have some good stuff on offer.

The Mods for a lot of my favourite game are generally very good, often as good as the original.