Game Engines under Open Source and why it might work for you as well.

[iLeet]

Hello there,

Unreal Engine 4 is under a certain open source license where I can download the full source code to the engine for a fee of 19$.
If I decide to create a game using their engine they charge 5% of the price tag.

Additionally I believe Unity have a similar very generous "open source" model.

I guess I don't have to mention id Software and their released code base under GPL.
Doom3 source code actually leaked out unintentionally during production and I don't believe they suffered any serious or major catastrophy as a result of it.

Several non-trivial improvements on the named engines above have actually been contributed from developers outside their studio.

The word of the street is that code in games does not build a company value that much as it used to be before but the assets, ip, community that supports the game and knowledge of how the game works are more important these days.
Spreading the knowledge means that you spread the risks. Your company will be less dependent on single individuals and the community at large who code / document features will actually help you in the long run.

Just suggesting that you might get some actual improvements done if you release the client open source.
There's obviously no guarantee at all to get anything more done than today but just saying that you might get surprised after all.

There are tons of resources online to read how to manage and steer open source projects in the general direction you want but I just want to tell you to seriously think if this model is not worth a try on a game that is old but imho very fun and rewarding.
I could press on a lot more but I won't. I just hope you will think about it.

I like the game and would hate to see it close down so let us get it even more fun and release the client or major parts of it open source.

Cheers for a fun game regardless how you decide to shape your future anyway!

[Tryptophy]

They certainly can't open source the whole thing, as they make use of many proprietary libraries which require licenses. In the end, given that this is an online game they really can't allow anyone to modify the source as there would be no way to prevent cheating. Open-sourcing would be a kind of swan song for the game, the last thing to do before the servers get shut off, because at that point for them to actually host a server would be pointless. Even then, the proprietary libraries problem stands in the way, plus the fact that I'm sure they've reused code in other games which they don't want made public for the above reasons. They could release it without the libraries and shared code and hope someone could fill in the gaps, but it's probably not worth their time. And again, this is only remotely possible in the event the servers get shut off.

[iLeet]

They certainly can't open source the whole thing, as they make use of many proprietary libraries which require licenses...
Even then, the proprietary libraries problem stands in the way, plus the fact that I'm sure they've reused code in other games which they don't want made public...
They could release it without the libraries and shared code and hope someone could fill in the gaps, but it's probably not worth their time. And again, this is only remotely possible in the event the servers get shut off.

Partially it could be true.
However there might exist other open source solutions or even public domain code that, if they exist, probably are better to use anyway.
I'm not saying that releasing the parts of the client code will make the game suddenly flourish. But I do believe that given some time the client will be more stable, secure and overall contain better code with more frequent updates.

If people know how the game is supposed to work from selected technical specs it's much easier to see when it works as intended or if it's really a bug or not. Besides it will be easier for people to give more valid suggestions regarding these matters.

I think that Funcom should consider it an option for the future. Especially now when they are working with the updated graphics engine and NPE.
For instance they could decide to let some aspect of the client to be released as open source where some reasonable changes are desired from their part.
Load that part of the client using a dll interface and check if the community actually helps or not.
Then they can decide after a while if they want to go further and release other pieces or just simply stay put and call it off.

In the end, given that this is an online game they really can't allow anyone to modify the source as there would be no way to prevent cheating.

There is no way to prevent a game from cheaters. Just to name a few there are people who hijack their drivers to get transparent walls and whatnot.
Proprietary "closed" solutions against cheating will only at best delay further hacks. Experience tells that the number of hacks will be proportional to how large the player base is.
The real cheaters wants their hacks to go unnoticed, so they can continue with the exploit(s).

I would like to add that clicksaver, which is widely used, is snooping the network traffic between the server and the client. As far as I understand the code have been released publicly available. Otherwise people should flat-out refuse to use it. Because it uses some hooks that are at best glance su****ious to me since the hook lib itself is not available in any other means than a runtime dll.

Finally I would like to add that this game have been subject to a lot of cheats even though it's proprietary software.

I could list many articles but I just selected two of them to show how other thinks about security/cheat issues.
http://itsecurityguru.org/open-sourc.../#.U_JxMvl_tBI
http://quake2world.net/blogs/jdolan/gpl-quake-anticheat