This is not true whatsoever of game code, which is the primary matter at hand. Rarely does a game company write a new engine from scratch, even when they want a very different version. E.g. Quake III is based on Quake II is based on Quake I, UT3 is based on UT2k4 is based on UT2k3 (can't remember the UTE version numbers).

When you're talking about game engines, however, recycling code isn't just an option, it's a necessity. You're not going to rewrite half a million lines of code if you don't have to -- it makes no sense. You update the engine, add new logic, and package it with new assets to release a new game. It's the only way that makes sense.

Many application vendors have released their code GPL'd or otherwise open source, but it's very rare in the gaming world.

The code is used for other projects by the same company. Few companies release their old/failed code -- id being the only game company I know of that does so (GPLing their old code).

Where in either of these documents did it say that the routine was written in assembly? I believe you were confused by the PDF's use of a disassembler.

Ugh, sad to hear. When will people learn that this nonsense only hurts them?

Assembly will only be used for small, high-cost operations. These pieces are small enough that if they malfunction, it's in a way that will be immediately visible.

I'm no DRM fan (I've been working against it for years, e.g. El Tunes and PyMusique), but there's no reason that it'd cause these problems, outside of the authorization problems. Once the game has started, the most the DRM will be doing is decrypting game code, if it's not decrypted entirely at loadtime.

This is bullshit. They're not making money off of the copyrighted works of students, they're making money off of their algorithms. Google is only good because they have sites to index, but it's their indexing code that makes that possible. Google indexes copyrighted materials, should they be compensating siteowners?

Wine doesn't support x64 code, so the only benefit you can get is having the full address space enabled (because the kernel can properly map memory).

Many, many engines support OpenGL. id tech 4 (Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, etc) was pure OpenGL, Unreal's engine is always D3D and OGL, etc. The only big engine that doesn't support OGL is Source; even stock Gamebryo supports it, although many games opt not to ship with it (e.g. Oblivion, Morrowind (back when it was NetImmerse)) since they make internal changes and don't care about maintaining OGL support.

Once you've reverse-engineered a hardware interface, it's rarely difficult to reverse the next iteration. The basic functionality is usually the same, it's just a slightly different version. The bigger issues are jailbreaking the new device, getting to the point where you can replace the bootloader, etc.

It's being reverse-engineered, like everything else on the iPhone. None of the specs for iBoot, the baseband, etc are public either and the iPhone hackers have done just fine. I'm confident they'll succeed.