[fiki574]

Just a viewpoint from another similar project developer.

I'm a lead dev of a project aimed to revive certain game since it was shut down back in 2013. Open sourcing a project was never considered the option (unless we get shutdown, DMCAd, C&Dd), just because the downsides in my opinion are bigger than upsides (splitting into multiple communities, each running their own version, not crediting work, people not knowing what they're doing but acting all smart, etc.). However, we did "invest" time and effort into hiring skilled developers, which obviously pushed as a lot more.

The main problem here I see is lack of commitment and working hands. Don't get me wrong, kudos to Kalcor and all involved developers that worked/work/will work on this. I know that sometimes it is hard to be motivated, especially when the community is as diverse as this one. However, I can not understand why there is absolutely no space to apply as a developer. The approach I took for my project is: person applies -> meeting arranged -> talk about and with the applicant -> give him an entry test (in form of reversing a small part of the game and creating a simple specific client-server implementation). This worked so well so far, that most of the developers I recruited are present and working on the project even today and turned out to be exactly as good as they described when applying (which was only confirmed by an entry test). It's easy to filter out people who are in just to snatch your code, and the ones that truly are skilled.

Conclusion: do not open source the project, however create a space for other interested developers to help you out meet deadlines and consequently speed up the development and release cycles.

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Back to the topic, if my code for the project I'm part of were to be stolen, I'd be devastated because I spent over 3 years on working on it and perfecting it just for someone to steal and leak it. Can't imagine how I would've felt if the 3 years were 13, and not 3.

Best of luck in future development!