Will the Runtime be open sourced? If not why not?

I'm also disappointed that Oculus has, to some extent, decided to 'take their ball and go home' in terms of the sensor fusion code. Now that the fusion code is hidden inside the runtime, developers are basically held hostage to the platforms that Oculus decides they want to support.

Lots of amazing things have been done on a variety of non-standard platforms by hackers and enthusiasts. Now those possibilities suddenly seem much more limited. Personally I'd hoped to develop some functionality for interacting with a media library on the Kindle Fire TV device. Now if I want to do that, I have to wait and hope the Oculus decides to support Android as a platform to the extent of providing the runtime, AND hope that they do it in such a way that's compatible with that particular device.

On the one hand, I can kind of understand the business justification for doing this. Maybe Oculus doesn't want to make it terribly easy for a competitor to simply pick up all their techniques by walking through the source code. But on the other hand, I think that if that's the reasoning behind this new closed source approach, it disproportionately punishes your legitimate hacking/development community. If some big company (*cough* Sony *cough*) really wants to reproduce the functionality, the closed source approach is barely going to be a speed-bump to them, especially if they've already got expertise with IMUs and optical tracking (*cough* PS Move *cough*).

I did have to decompile one of the functions to work out why it was crashing there.

But I think it is AntVR etc. rather than Sony that they want to keep their hard work away from.

I completely agree with the OP here, and I also share jherico's concerns about platform support. Even in terms of the Linux version, if the runtime is a binary blob, that's going to seriously inhibit compatibility with different ditros. What happens when my distro bumps a major package version? Oh good, my Oculus runtime no longer works, and I can't fix it :?

Already we've seen major reliability and performance problems with the 0.4 SDK branch. The community could have fixed those problems themselves by now if the source was available. Instead we have to wait on Oculus.

I suppose I was naive in thinking the Rift was going to be a fun, hackable device. I completely understand the license on the Rift SDK code, but that license is already enough to prevent competing devices benefiting from the company's research. Actually closing the source and only releasing binary blobs will seriously limit the Rift's usefulness and longevity. Any rivals bent on illegally using Oculus code will just disassemble the binary anyway. Software licenses are how you protect IP. Going binary-only is just an inconvenience for users.

I would not like this is something related to fb..

Why can't we get a simple answer, Oculus?

If you don't know or wont tell, then post that as well. It's better than just leaving everybody guessing.

"ElectricMucus" wrote:
Why can't we get a simple answer, Oculus?

If you don't know or wont tell, then post that as well. It's better than just leaving everybody guessing.

Not from their perspective. If they say no and decide to release the source later they just look foolish. If they say they don't want to release the source and give no reason, they look churlish. If they say they don't want to release it and the do give a reason, then they're inviting debate (both reasonable and unreasonable). A company is usually better off (from a public relations point of view) saying nothing than saying something that's likely to be unpopular.

If developers were abandoning Oculus in droves because of this issue, then they might address it or even be forced to change their stance, but that's not happening. A few hackers care, but we're not Oculus' bread and butter and for the time being at least, Oculus is the only game in town.

Of course in a few years if VR takes off and Microsoft and Sony start producing VR for PCs, Oculus might wish it had fostered a better relationship with the hackers. While they may not all be making awesome games, as far as I can tell, the killer app for VR hasn't been found yet, and the hacker community is more likely than any other to do so, in my opinion. That's just speculation though. Grain of salt and all that.

"jherico" wrote:

Not from their perspective. If they say no and decide to release the source later they just look foolish. If they say they don't want to release the source and give no reason, they look churlish. If they say they don't want to release it and the do give a reason, then they're inviting debate (both reasonable and unreasonable). A company is usually better off (from a public relations point of view) saying nothing than saying something that's likely to be unpopular.

If developers were abandoning Oculus in droves because of this issue, then they might address it or even be forced to change their stance, but that's not happening. A few hackers care, but we're not Oculus' bread and butter and for the time being at least, Oculus is the only game in town.

Of course in a few years if VR takes off and Microsoft and Sony start producing VR for PCs, Oculus might wish it had fostered a better relationship with the hackers. While they may not all be making awesome games, as far as I can tell, the killer app for VR hasn't been found yet, and the hacker community is more likely than any other to do so, in my opinion. That's just speculation though. Grain of salt and all that.

Intelligent, most likely accurate, and extremely depressing summary :lol:

I'm looking forward to Oculus getting some competition in the near future. That generally makes it harder for companies to pull stuff like this.