There’s a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it’s been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord “if you have any questions”.
Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won’t be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn’t have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What’s wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you’re making supposedly open products in?
In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?
This whole thread seems weirdly dismissive of, and in some cases hostile to, maintainers of FOSS projects. To be clear, I’m not referring to OP here - the ID verification wall, and even the need to use a platform like Discord in general, are real problems. It’s many of the responses that are problematic.
The reason many projects have support servers on Discord is because that’s where their communities formed. For example, Rust has communities on Matrix and Discord. The majority of the community is on Discord. There’s also a lot of users who discuss the language on Reddit.
Communities existing on proprietary, walled off platforms isn’t the problem. The problem is when those platforms are the only way to access documentation or support. For projects like this, try creating an issue and explaining how ID verification stops you from accessing documentation and support, and see if they can open up discussions (if they’re on GitHub), create a community wiki, etc.
As for what to call them - let’s assume that anything that requires access to these platforms doesn’t exist. What do you call that? FOSS with shitty documentation? It’d still be FOSS at least.