@AlexDC22, I'm afraid your information is a little outdated. The community is no longer a fly by night kind of place where we rely on open everything to grow. There's a middle ground now.
First, it's true that fan games don't have any copyright over the IP, but you have to remember much of a fan game IS original work, and very much protected under US copyright law. For example,
@Kratus obviously has no claim over Streets of Rage or any of its characters, stage, design, etc., but all of the code he wrote to power the game is his. Sega can tell him to stop distributing anything SOR related, but if they try to take the code, he can not only tell them to get bent, he could counter sue if they use it without his permission.
The second thing is that most quality creators lock their stuff in good faith - meaning anyone who actually wants to learn and use samples are more than welcome to do it, and the creator will provide them if asked. The problem is once any creator reaches a level of notoriety (again using
@Kratus as an example), the bad actors out number the good by far. For every would be creator wanting to learn how this or that script works for legitimate projects, there's a dozen or more idiots who want to make freaky alternates with dartboard edits, porn, rape, and other deleterious editions. I only wish I was being hypothetical about any of that, and when it happens, that reflects poorly on all of us.
It also causes us to loose good, talented people. As one example, in the years you were gone, we had a fantastic creator
@Pierwolf who pushed out a lot of cool stuff, but every time he did, someone was right there to copy + paste it into trash. The last straw and by far most infamous being the Las Noches Skyperas group, whose Final Fight LNS prompted him to leave the community for good.
@O Ilusionista and
@Kratus could tell you all about those people.
I had to take my own stuff private for similar reasons. I had a lot of my WIPs public on GitHUB, but despite my continued warnings not to take the materials out of context - that's EXACTLY what people kept doing, and then complaining to me about it not working. Even better, someone would use the code (which is what it was there for), but then another person would accuse me of stealing it from the creator who copied from me. So, I had enough and took it all down. Now I only provide specific samples as needed.
TLDR - we can't attract and keep talent with a free for all attitude. In any case, I do not, and will not enforce sharing/no sharing polices. That's up to the creator.
DC
