Comment Re:In other words (Score 1) 8
Right now, there's this terrible tendency to fork, fork, fork - and every fork is competing for eyeballs, mindshare in the noosphere, or whatevr you call it. And they're all mostly starving for revenue, because there are just too many choices, and the quality is pretty much the same among all of them.
So, you created a game as open surce, someone else forks it, now you're both competing for code contributions (after all, there's no guarantee the fork will stay code-compatible as time goes on), so the fork eventually results in the pool of contribs you can use going down, nt up.
Also, your user base goes down, since it's now split with the fork(s).
So, you take and make a closed version, fix all the bugs in the closed version while improving the code, and release it as closed-source. You weren't getting the relevant code contributions anyway, so you don't really care. You'll continue to benefit from artwork and plugins (you've maintained binary compatibility), so now you can compete again.
More importantly, you can now sell the program on a per-copy basis, generating the revenues to continue development if the game is any good.
Both your old code base and the open forks can continue to exist, and you can even maintain the open version of your code if you so choose - that's your choice.
The problem is that open source isn't competitive for most projects when it comes to the financial side. Which is why there are so many bugs out there - nobody is being paid to do the dirty work of fixing them. In terms of percentages, open source is actually losing ground - compare the explosive growth in paid closed-source apps in the mobile field. Why? Follow the money
It's either adapt or die. I don't see any other way if improving the quality of the stuff out there, or of reducing the insane number of forks (how many linux distros are there out there now? Over 1,000?)