I never suggested to open source it, hence the comparison to Torque 2D (source included with buy).
If we give every registered user the source I don't think it would be long at all before a leak. We've got scammers already ripping off Classic, users from other tools with irrational grudges, etc. so I think actually it would leak pretty much straight away. I don't know how Torque 2D manages it. Perhaps nobody's leaked it so it's not a problem, or they can afford to hire lawyers to shut down anyone abusing the source code whenever they spot instances of it. We're a two-man team working from home and considering we're just about to start issuing licenses, I don't think we'll be able to afford the legal costs that might be implied by this kind of thing for some time.
re you sure illegal stolen products get big enough to attract users who would otherwise have purchased the real product though?
It's not just lost sales - suppose the following:
- ripoffs come loaded with viruses or spyware, then people start widely avoiding it because they don't trust it,
- ripoffs break things or are based on old versions, then users complain to us about the bugs,
- users pay for a ripoff then get angry and come complaining to us,
- the extremely amateurish looking ripoff websites are embarrassing for us and give us a bad reputation,
- etc...
In short it's potentially a serious problem and I don't think we have the necessary resources to adequately deal with it.
How likely do you think it is you'll need to debug the editor though? It seems to me that the most likely issues will occur in the runtime, in which case you can just fire up Chrome's debugger and see what's happening in the javascript for yourself. In the editor, I suppose with the source you could debug and see what's happening, but like I say, aren't you worried anything you change would cause a corrupt-project style bug? Integrity of user data isn't an issue in an ordinary game engine like Torque 2D, but in an editor it's absolutely crucial. If you come across problems I'm more than happy to debug and fix it. You can probably see on the bugs forum it's something I do routinely. Also, in the past, we've pushed releases out in a matter of hours. If it's urgent the fix can probably be out in a few days, rather than waiting months for Construct 2.5 or whatever.