A year ago, I would've agreed with that statement. I'm a huge fan of open source, but the fact is that merely open sourcing something doesn't mean that you suddenly have an influx of developers. Depending on other open source developers should never ever be your sole strategy, that would be just plain dumb.

Also, you'd still need to coordinate the developers. Throw a bunch of random people at your code base and let them do whatever the fuck they want, and you suddenly end up with a terrible code base.


It's actually a very bad example. The same as Linux would've been a bad example. There are fantastic open source projects out there that are developed by great people, the whole GNU project for example, or the *BSD flavour of your choice, LLVM/Clang, Blender, Ogre...
You know what these projects have in common? An active community and good people high enough up the chain that lead the development. Take OpenBSD for example, a fantastic software project that brought us things like SSH, but it would've never been at the place where it currently is, if Theo de Raadt wasn't ruling it by force (and yes, I picked the most controversial project in this regard as example).

I doubt that JCL wants to become the babysitter of a bunch of developers who are to 99% wannabe developers that would commit atrocious code or try to refactor the whole code base on a whim because they felt like it and read a piece on altdevblogaday about how this cool new hipster concept that nets you 20% more performance in edge cases where the moon in 3/4th over the sun and a hen lay two golden eggs in the Himalaya.

But JCL would HAVE to be the babysitter, because one of the Gamestudios strongest points, backward compatibility, would be out the window before you are able to clone the repository. Also people implementing ten thousand edge case functions they need for one very specific task but that should totally be part of the engine.

Not to mention having to play support for famous question like:
How do I set up the build environment?
It says [dependency] couldn't be found by the linker. Your code sucks
Why are using tabs/spaces instead of space/tabs you dingdong?
I didn't read the license agreement, but it's okay if I sell it, right?

Also, preparing an existing and large code base to become open source takes a lot of time, a good lawyer that checks potential IP claims. Besides of the fact that JCL already said that they use licensed third party code.

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