Open Source Migration

While perusing redit recently, I cam across a link to a Valve Software Github page. This repository is currently empty except for a readme and a license, but it’s valves first step into releasing it’s Game Networking Sockets framework as an open source project. This framework will handle NAT punchthrough and relay and is the actual code valve uses for most of its games. There hope that once this is released it will be a better documented and better maintained version of RakNet, another proprietary gone open source framework that accomplishes the same thing. There are complaints in the community about the current (or at least recent) state of RakNet and it’s documentation.

This is a pretty exciting announcement, and I also think that it can be a cool opportunity to learn about what it takes for a company to take it’s software and migrate it to open source. If valve does a good job releasing this software to the community, it will probably become much more widely used than most other frameworks like it. I don’t think that the project will fall into a state of disarray as I imagine valve will keep some people working on it full time, not that full time employees are required to keep a FOSS project healthy, it just certainly helps.

This movement of proprietary software to open source is not new, and is in fact seeming to gain more traction. For instance RakNet, the framework mentioned earliere, used to be licensed until it was purchased by Oculus and made open source. I think this is a step in a good direction, but I’m taking this all with a grain of salt. I think it’s definitely good, but I just inherently don’t trust large companies to do anything purely for the sake of good. So long as nothing nefarious beings to pop up, however, I don’t think I have any objection. I’ll allow it. But I’ll be watching.