Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: eldakingThis is one of those things where "open source" doesn't really mean much.

They could release their client software under the GPL or MIT or whatever, and then anyone would be able to make a client just like theirs - but the part that matters is the API and being able to talk to their servers, which is entirely separate from the source code of the client. People could make unofficial clients if Valve allowed it, with no access to the source code of the official client. And even if you had the source code, if Valve didn't want to let your unofficial client connect it wouldn't do shit.

With the server software it is even more laughable. Are all we users of Steam going to host our own stores? With humongous servers and all? Even if someone wanted to, all the games by all the publishers are still in Valve's servers and their agreements are with Valve, you would have a store with no games.

Only other big competitors could really benefit from any of that, by taking whatever good parts and incorporating into their own stuff - which is the biggest reason for Valve to not do it. No user would benefit from the extra freedom, but it would be for the benefit of their competitors with no counterpart. But frankly, that wouldn't even be a big deal, wouldn't make the market more competitive or anything: the companies able to compete in this space, and able to maintain such a humongous infrastructure and code base, are big enough that the software is hardly the bottleneck. They can make their own clients and servers in the way they prefer, many already have. They might lack some features, but the biggest problem with the various clients from the various stores are the anti-features, the shit they intentionally broke to better exploit us.

Free and open source isn't a magic solution. A lot of the most hostile, anti-consumer software is at least partially FOSS - Google built it's dystopian monopoly on top of it. In this case we need interoperability and open standards, accountability and user empowerment, not just source code.

It would mean a lot just not for direct competition.
It would make the life of custom launchers like heroic much easier.
It would allow people to build their own personalized clients(they could write their own recommendation algorithms, spoof data provided by the client to the server, provide more or less of the information the client receives to the user, make it more platform compatible, etc.).
It would allow researchers to run localized tests on the server infrastructure without bothering Valve who actually needs that infrastructure.
It could allow all kinds of existing platforms to integrate steam in their offerings.

Yeah but the prerequisite to all of that is a properly documented public API; open sourcing the client *without* offering a documented API would make the developers' job only slightly easier -- they'd still need to reverse engineer how to talk to Steam's servers by reading through the client code, which, for all we know, could be a jumble of uncommented hacks.

If truly publish their source code and they plan on working with it in the future allowing it to be spaghetti code is dumb.
Basically all open source contributing involves hours of looking at the relevant source code with sparse to no docs.
As long the naming is correct and consistent and the code mediocre(or better) written you could extract the api info from it without significant testing and beyond that you could still use it for grey box analysis.