Not likely to happen, and I feel like it'd cause the community to fragment.

I don't see the passport system surviving a switch to open source. All someone would have to do would be to change the passport proc to return TRUE.

Binary release integrity can happily be maintained outside out of the open-source framework, through client - server - hub public key authentication with keys kept by BYOND staff. This is reasonable, you expect central release to be centrally managed.

Sure, you can compile the BYOND suite yourself (not withstanding the effort required to configure the development environment to do this), then host it with such a proc implementation in force.

However only clients with binary from your compilation (thus matching keys) could hope to connect. So now you need to distribute a separate BYOND version to your prospective players. "Vanilla" clients would fail to authenticate the server, and disconnect accordingly as clearly something is not correct there.

Of course, this needs repeating by the offender every BYOND release. Quite a lot of hassle to invalidate the passport.

There's principally nothing stopping me altering BYOND's binary to do this now actually, and vanilla clients would probably (haven't checked the client implementation) have no issue with this. It would actually be easier to maintain such tampering, due to the lesser security our current version has (security by obscurity).

The reason you don't see it is simply because it's not worth the effort. That statement would still hold under the open source framework.

The malicious recompile argument is a common one, but ill-founded in most cases. Why would I download your version? Clearly with the architecture (one of many options) noted above, your version would have to carry some pretty significant personal gains for me to bother installing it over vanilla BYOND. This attack vector is just too niche to net you anything worth keeping, you wouldn't bother.

If you advertise a BYOND game outside of BYOND it would be very easy to get people to download your version of the software. Besides, a problem doesn't have to affect all users for it to be a security risk. Keeping it closed source avoids so many problems. In the ideal world all software would be open source but when you begin to consider the real world problems you'd run into you quickly realize its not worthwhile.

I'd imagine if BYOND went open source, then we'd have millions of BYOND engines called "DRAGONBALL BYOND MAKER" or something of the sorts, given the nature of this community. Whilst I agree that BYOND has it's fair share of good developers (and I'm glad to see BobOfDoom and Bandock in your list), I think there aren't enough to justify this. And that's not even regarding security issues.

The standing assumption here seems to be that the people you are all worrying about regarding quality and niche builds can actually compile and extend a complex project like BYOND. From prior experience with some on BYOND who consider themselves acceptable programmers attempting to wield a C++ IDE, there's a natural barrier to entry that negates the bulk of these issues being brought up.

Much less the issues being brought up are short-sighted. Try forking a project like Wine, and maintaining a patch-set for it, keeping up to date with their developments, re-distributing it after you've applied your patch-set (which invariably requires further code-changes to resolve conflicts) with EVERY release to your given customer-base. It's not going to be fun to do, or worth their while, because forking any C++ project of size in active development is a lot of effort.

Much less that there aren't enough benefits to justify this, the downsides are overstated and in some cases plainly naive. It's FUD, basically, and not worth the time considering in the forking case, and easily mitigated (and just as doable now) in the password theft and passport case.

Toad has brought up the first questions that aren't involving some element of FUD here. In my opinion:

1. Yes, as it's not the code that actually encourages contribution, it's the management. There are some serious management lessons to be learned from Fedora project, which sports one of the most active and inclusive development communities of any open source project I've seen, WineHQ and Kernel included.

Availability of documentation is a big factor at work, and enablement. Tom I think knows the documentation isn't up to scratch by any means, however there should be ways of progressing this communally.

Currently the developers Airjoe mentions are "going it alone". They are essentially reverse engineering the entire platform and developing bits of it themselves. If they have made the progress we have seen with zero source code (much less documentation), imagine the enablement of opening that source code up to them. Instead of looking to essentially replace the BYOND suite, they'll be building upon it and improving it. It stops being a technical fork, and starts being moving wheels on the main project.

2. This is a good point. Not so much the wading through contributions, as from a technical standpoint that isn't too bad, but from a feature request standpoint. Some steering group would be required here, which is essentially the BYOND staff as it currently is.

The difference I think you'll see is requests which "need discussion" will get much more detailed if coming from a developer contributor, in order to help the steering committee out. You'd stop having Tom and Lummox play devil's advocate for a feature, and have someone actually trial the technical detail of it and see the issues first-hand.

3. This requires some consideration, although I think even if you went ahead without that consideration the number of issues actually exploited would be small and addressable pretty promptly.

There's a thousand bucks in it for Tom? Explain, please.

Oh, well, shoot. If Airjoe wants to throw a thousand bucks at BYOND he could throw it at me instead and I'd turn around a few quality games. :)

He needs money to pay artist from my understanding.

Paying for artwork, mostly. If you frequent the art guild you'll notice a lot of BYOND's local artists are either busy working on fangames or just not taking on jobs anymore. Outside artists take on jobs for cellphone games and flash games which regularly get sponsored for a few thousand dollars.

You can't just say "you'll get a cut of future subscriptions," that sort of thing doesn't fly on PixelJoint. You need to pay an honest price for some honest work.