What is Source?

Source is a game engine created by Valve Corporation and first released in 2004 in Half-Life 2. It has a very large modding community due to it being very easy to mod.

Why should it be open sourced?

As mentioned, Source has a very large modding community that would benefit heavily from the source code being released. The currently released sdk is outdated (last updated in 2015) and only contains game code, not engine code. With access to the engine, modders would be able to overhaul many more things, and make it an even better engine to use for indie game development.

Why now, almost 20 years after it first appeared?

Valve is finally transitioning their main game (CS:GO) off of Source and on to Source 2 (their new, modern engine). This means that the main way they make money, and a very popular online competitive game, are no longer on Source, so it would be much safer for them to open source it now (so they wouldn't lose money and wouldn't increase the amount of cheaters in CS:GO)

What's this about licensed parts?

Parts of Source including the physics engine were licensed from other companies, and Valve wouldn't be legally allowed to open source them without an agreement with those other companies which will probably never happen. The community has already created a replacement physics engine for Source in the open source VPhysics-Jolt project, so it wouldn't be too much of an issue to not have this specific part of the codebase.

This sound interesting to you? Please sign the petition, and maybe (I pray) we can get Valve to open source Source.