this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I hate it when people use Github and pretend an application is open source when in fact they only host a couple of screenshots and a binary download. The "source code" download only contains the screenshots and the Readme.
That was my exact reaction too, but then I remembered that the source that this source-port is based on was not officially released. It was leaked a little while back (last year?), so that means if the authors of this source port make the source available then they could be liable for a DMCA takedown request or a copyright lawsuit.
They could make their changes available as a patch-set though, requiring end-users to locate a copy of the leaked source themselves and apply the patches.
That's in no way different with a binary-only release and also not a good reason to mislead people on top of that.
I think the source code download is automatically added by GitHub when you create a release in a project, and I don't know that there's any way to remove it. So I don't think the "source code" download is necessarily intentionally misleading, but apart from that, yeah, you're absolutely right. It is a bit of a shitty way to use GitHub.
The source code archives weren't explicitly placed by that person but everyone who ever used Github knows exactly that this happens. Even a quick glance at the URL suggests it's an open source implementation of the engine.