> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind.
Free Software sure, that wasn't the point.
Open Source, that was exactly the point. Eric S Raymond, one of the original promoters of the concept of Open Source coined Linus' Law:
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
Which definitely points in the direction of receiving bug reports and patches from users of the application. He was also a proponent of the Bazaar model, where software is developed in public, as opposed to the Cathedral model where software is only released in milestones (he used GCC and Emacs as examples, which reinforces the part of your statement about the Free Software movement in particular).
ESR is also from a time where spamming countless reports/junk code wasn't really a concept.
They did have things like trolls and zealots that thought "Their one idea" was a gift from god and the maintainers were idiots for not adding it to the application. And eventually those people may have been banned from mailing lists. But in general the people posting code were typically well known and had some interest in fixing the application for some useful purpose.
Simply put, no idealism stands the test of time without change. Nature shows us that everything must evolve or it goes extinct. How 'free software' evolves is now up for debate.
Linus’ Law doesn’t really imply anything about maintainers behavior though. As an example, you can imagine maintainers that never update their repos. Every bug fix is a forking of the repo, and people only use the repo with the latest commits. Eventually, the bug count goes down as well!
But they're not going after people who use the mod. They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP. Someone else said upthread that CDPR doesn't go after people who make free mods (or donationware) so it's clear they don't have a problem with mods per se.
I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
Depending on your age the term Game Genie [1] probably brings back some fond memories. If it was before your time, it was a hardware device - a mod, you could attach to video game devices that would enable you to tweak the memory of the game in real time enabling you to do all sorts of things, mostly it was used for stuff like infinite lives or whatever but you could also do neat things like tweak the gravity in games.
The neat thing is that the device was completely unapproved by the device IP owners, most notably - Nintendo. It required the creators to reverse engineer the NES, crack their anti-pirate measures, and then finally enable a nice interface for users to 'hack' games at the end of it. And then for the icing on the cake they then bought copies of every single NES game, 'cracked' them, and published, and sold, books with codes for specific games precisely profiting off players of these games.
Nintendo tried to sue, and lost. They appealed, and lost. The Game Genie wasn't violating Nintendo's IP, they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything. And so it was a pretty much open and shut case with all the legal wrangling lasting mere months. And the exact same is true here. As a fun aside this even set the precedent for legally selling games on consoles without the approval of the console IP owner.
The point is that a derivative work has to be a derivative work, not just something that works with your IP. And this just sounds like a mod that hacks in VR capability for dozens of games that don't otherwise support it. I imagine they'll comply simply because going to court against just one of those companies is going to be a lot easier than fighting it, but it's a shame. Mainstream success seems to have turned into a terrible curse for CDPR.
> they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything.
I would like an even stronger precedent, to say that even if sales are harmed, it's non-infringing. E.g. a car aftermarket customization that improves performance so that it is equivalent to a more expensive model of the same brand, thus harming profits of that car brand. Or hell, just plain old regular repairs, so one can keep an old car for longer.
We don't owe it to corporations to protect their business models.
How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content or require any particular feature of a base game (the "mod" supports many games) and is actually primarily meant for interoperation with a novel input and display method?
If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
> How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content
Adding a VR mode to the game is definitely adding content. If you mean storywise, okay, I agree with you. Still, he's profiting off it in the fact that you need to pay a monthly fee to access the mod.
Even if he claims he's not, he indeed is profiting off it, because there is no way you can use the mod without paying first.
> If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
The difference is that Valve would have asked for permission first from CDPR if they could sell their software, or even then, work together with CDPR to have the software be implemented natively on the game. Plus, Valve has the same stance on paid mods on Steam, so it's not really a good comparison here.
> I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
I don't see any difference between a paid or free mod. Were CD Projekt losing out on sales of the VR DLC?
> They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP.
They are going after someone who is making their IP more valuable. I missed Cyberpunk the first time around due to the initial bad reviews and then not having time after they fixed them.
With Valve coming out with their VR headset I am considering getting one, and looking at VR games, Cyberpunk with the mod was going to be a purchase.
TL;DR: since 2013 in Italy we've had a controversial regulation that compels internet providers to block access to certain IP addresses when the communication authority flags them. The problem, of course, is that if a copyright infringing websites shares it's IP address with legitimate sites, those sites become collateral damage.
Inkl, on the other hand, is still alive and kicking. If you're ok with their selection of sources it's 9.99 per month o 99.99 per year. I still have a pay-per-read subscription, which I prefer to the subscription model, but I'm afraid they don't offer that anymore.
> I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are
The problem is not whether I think it's important. The problem is the customer thinking that's important. Or simply that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to be aware of what another vendor wrote.
I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm currently sitting at.
On the other hand I find that the real value of such posts are in the comment section here on HN, especially with posters who don't agree with the article.
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