isn’t enough to call it open source
I never said that ProtonDB was open source.
you would still have a diverging dataset if you allow people to insert new records in the new app
An Open source WebApp would not prevent this from happenning either. A community-led fork is nothing if “new entries” are all going through the main open source tool extending the “old” database.
It would only benefits from having the same code base. Same problem, doesn’t solve it.
The ProtonDB owners could just decide to not export that data any longer whenever they want.
I haven’t read the whole license myself so I don’t know all the legal aspect if they were going to do this.
But if they chose to close the database future entries, I’m pretty confident that the Linux Gaming community will organize themselves to quickly get another app, forking the open database previous from the closing decision. Allowing them to quickly move to a new common place. ProtonDB will probably lost reputation and usage as time goes but this is not a prediction scenario.
You also can’t change the data being Steam specific when the app is closed source and not accepting contributions
That’s another (valid) point. But nothing prevent you to build a webapp that periodacly imports from ProtonDB database to show Steam games data while also lists other titles that are not available through Steam creating a new database with your users entries for other platforms.
Open Source is a way to organize people around a project. ProtonDB author doesn’t seems to want their code to be publicly available for consulting nor for improving or modifying by external people. And that’s their rights to do so. For now, it seems that their projects is benefiting the Linux gaming community and the open license of the database is appreciated. If the project goes in an unexpected direction, people can fork the database which is the most valuable data, more than the code of the webapp.





It is not next-generation, this is a versionning solution for a different kind of software than git. Git works extremely well for traditional software development.
Lore seems to be tailored for video games and other software that have large amount of assets, partial checkouts, worktree where patched-based system is not very well adapted.