Quote Originally Posted by na85 View Post
Actions speak louder than words. If your intention is for the good of the project, why is the engine source not freely available under a GPL or similar license?

I can't see any benefit to the project in keeping it closed.
I cannot agree more and you were in our shoes back in the day, you would probably see the same benefits. We had a fresh engine needed to be tested to the oblivion. We could maximize concurrent users this way to do the job.

On the other hand it was damned hard to trust anyone after having theft, betrayal, cheating, hacking, **** stirring and all kinds of crazy **** among developer ranks. All we wanted was to get away from drama so we could not afford risking something that wouldn't really help development. People even had a rough time using the engine on the application side so letting them develop it, which is by far more complex, didn't seem a viable option that could benefit the project.

Later on, had the chance to use the engine in commercial projects. Imagine hackers tearing apart such an immature engine causing the company a great deal of loss, so this completely closed the door for releasing it.

Whether or not this was the right decision, we did it in belief of doing it for the good of the project.