A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
Why would we need open source instead of just removing drm?
Most people aren’t going to compile old games for new hardware. That’s not an easy task.
Abandonware is a thing, and there are some websites dedicated to it. GOG has done some great stuff releasing drm free games. So long as we have drm free, we can always build emulators to run what can’t natively run on modern systems.
Are you kidding? Think about all the skilled contributors that currently work on emulators, do you not think that some of them would switch to working on re-compiling games? And I agree there are probably weird platforms that it wouldn’t be easy for, but anything x86 is going to be much more trivial. I mean, someone was even reverse-engineering Super Mario 64, re-coding the entire game. The original source code and ability to use the code without getting sued would make things so much easier. Yeah, not every game would be done, but the big titles would be.
As far as emulating the rest, access to the source code would make it far, far simpler to figure out compatibility issues and make sure that every game is actually playable.