alt Hacker NewsThat could change once a law comes out requiring all new developments to be designed differently. Besides, no one is talking about open sourcing the server code. Releasing binaries and patching the client to talk to a local instance is perfectly acceptable. A developer would then just need the ability to redistribute compiled builds.
That was my initial thought as well, but on second thought it does not seem like such a good idea to provide binaries that will never get patched for a public-facing service. Sure, not the company’s issue anymore, but still…
It might make a community rewrite of the server code easier, but that would likely only be attempted for very few games.