We've all been there right? You paid for a game, it required an active internet connection and a couple of years later the publisher decided they're done with it and shut it down leaving you with a broken game. Annoying.
I know it makes people cranky, but look at Yuzu "becoming" Suyu. All the Suyu team really has is memes and the ability to selfhost a gitlab. They don't have the resources to maintain or develop the emulator themselves. And it is only a matter of time until one or more yuzu "forks" become bitcoin miners that improved support for the latest Mario game or whatever. Personally? I would rather NOLF remain in limbo than for it to become synonymous with viruses and stolen crypto.
Licensing? It depends how the company handled it but it is generally "a dick move" to change the license of an existing codebase without the consent of the developers. So you either end up flattening all history (and thus, nobody gets credit for the work they did) or you need to make sure that Jeff who left the company four years ago is cool suddenly getting pinged on issues with the cape physics code he forgot about.
AND that also assumes that it used no proprietary resources. Maybe that cape physics code is REAL good and the company doesn't want to have to throw that away when it can still give them an advantage for a new title. Or it might be as simple as depending on an internal build farm or tool. While we all make fun of them for it, there is a reason Facebook/Meta developers are fucking idiots when it comes to git. Because Sapling was designed to fit their needs and workflow and changes just enough that you can never trust a former meta dev to understand anything about VCS. But... that also becomes an issue if you are just uploading it to Microsoft's Github.
Also: This gets into territory that even as an anonymous user I am going to tiptoe around but understand that it is not uncommon to work with vendors and other support staff who will gladly contribute essential code that you more or less have a legal department's worth of paperwork saying you won't share.
they could release it all as-is under gpl when they sunset a game and then someone else would do all the work...
I know it makes people cranky, but look at Yuzu "becoming" Suyu. All the Suyu team really has is memes and the ability to selfhost a gitlab. They don't have the resources to maintain or develop the emulator themselves. And it is only a matter of time until one or more yuzu "forks" become bitcoin miners that improved support for the latest Mario game or whatever. Personally? I would rather NOLF remain in limbo than for it to become synonymous with viruses and stolen crypto.
Licensing? It depends how the company handled it but it is generally "a dick move" to change the license of an existing codebase without the consent of the developers. So you either end up flattening all history (and thus, nobody gets credit for the work they did) or you need to make sure that Jeff who left the company four years ago is cool suddenly getting pinged on issues with the cape physics code he forgot about.
AND that also assumes that it used no proprietary resources. Maybe that cape physics code is REAL good and the company doesn't want to have to throw that away when it can still give them an advantage for a new title. Or it might be as simple as depending on an internal build farm or tool. While we all make fun of them for it, there is a reason Facebook/Meta developers are fucking idiots when it comes to git. Because Sapling was designed to fit their needs and workflow and changes just enough that you can never trust a former meta dev to understand anything about VCS. But... that also becomes an issue if you are just uploading it to Microsoft's Github.
Also: This gets into territory that even as an anonymous user I am going to tiptoe around but understand that it is not uncommon to work with vendors and other support staff who will gladly contribute essential code that you more or less have a legal department's worth of paperwork saying you won't share.