@AlexDC22, I'm afraid your information is a little outdated. The community is no longer a fly by night kind of place where we rely on open everything to grow. There's a middle ground now.
First, it's true that fan games don't have any copyright over the IP, but you have to remember much of a fan game IS original work, and very much protected under US copyright law. For example,
@Kratus obviously has no claim over Streets of Rage or any of its characters, stage, design, etc., but all of the code he wrote to power
SORX is his. Sega can tell him to stop distributing anything SOR related, but if they try to take the code, he can not only tell them to get bent, he could counter sue if they use it without his permission.
The second thing is that most quality creators lock their work in good faith. In my experience, people who genuinely want to learn, study examples, or use samples for legitimate projects are usually welcome to ask, and many creators will help them directly.
The problem is that once a creator reaches a certain level of notoriety - again, using
@Kratus as an example - the bad actors start to outnumber the good ones. For every would-be creator trying to understand how a script works or learn from someone else’s technique, there are a dozen people looking to make lazy copy-paste edits, broken knockoffs, fetish versions, porn edits, rape-themed edits, or other garbage variants.
I wish I were being hypothetical about that, but I am not. When those versions get passed around, they do not just reflect badly on the person who made them. They reflect badly on the original creator, the engine, and the community around it.
Unwanted hacks also cause us to lose good, talented people.
For example, during the years you were away, we had a fantastic creator named
@Pierwolf who put out a lot of cool work. But every time he released something, someone seemed to be right there waiting to copy and paste it into trash.
The last straw, and by far the most infamous example, was the Las Noches Skyperas group. Their Final Fight LNS project was one of the things that pushed him to leave the community for good.
@O Ilusionista and
@Kratus could tell you plenty about those people.
I had to take my own work private for similar reasons.
For a long time, I had many of my WIPs public on GitHub. They were there so people could study the code, learn from it, and use pieces of it where appropriate. But despite repeated warnings not to take the materials out of context, that is exactly what kept happening. People would grab unfinished code, drop it into unrelated projects, and then complain to me when it did not work. Even better, someone would use my code - which was the entire reason it was public - and then another person would accuse me of stealing it from the creator who copied from me.
Eventually, I had enough and took it all down. Now I only provide specific samples as needed.
TLDR - we can't attract and keep talent with a free for all attitude. In any case, I do not, and will not enforce sharing/no sharing polices. That's up to the creator.
DC
