My early experience with programming was in GMod. This was 2006-2012.
Addons are written in Lua and are released as unobfuscated source (though, that may have changed with Workshop support). I learned a lot by reading and modifying other people's code.
While releasing modified versions of addons made by others was frowned upon, I feel like the community was very receptive of inexperienced young people. There was a general air of helpfulness and collaboration. Everyone was making cool stuff for its own sake. There was no profit motive involved.
Just wanted to put this out there. :) I mostly agree with you about the questionable motives behind the modern almost-sort-of-demand for open source software. But there are communities out there (I think most modding communities are like this?) that have a completely different take on releasing code.
FOSS absolutism leads to the situation we have now where a swathe of tech companies are built on FOSS software, operating for-profit, whilst the original authors fail to receive a few meagre voluntary PayPal donations.
My early experience with programming was in GMod. This was 2006-2012.
Addons are written in Lua and are released as unobfuscated source (though, that may have changed with Workshop support). I learned a lot by reading and modifying other people's code.
While releasing modified versions of addons made by others was frowned upon, I feel like the community was very receptive of inexperienced young people. There was a general air of helpfulness and collaboration. Everyone was making cool stuff for its own sake. There was no profit motive involved.
Just wanted to put this out there. :) I mostly agree with you about the questionable motives behind the modern almost-sort-of-demand for open source software. But there are communities out there (I think most modding communities are like this?) that have a completely different take on releasing code.
FOSS absolutism leads to the situation we have now where a swathe of tech companies are built on FOSS software, operating for-profit, whilst the original authors fail to receive a few meagre voluntary PayPal donations.