It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
Look, I don’t really like container, I would not suggest they are the solution for everything, but in some cases they have their use.
I see this as one of the cases where a container can have a use. You can also use a virtual machine if you want, the point is to have something that can be run even if the original OS or libraries needed are not available anymore because they are too old or have some incompatible changes, which in the case of old game server can happen, especially if you want to keep it running for many years after the release.
I firmly disagree that this would be a good use case. Allowing this kind of container shenanigans would introduce more incompatibilities than it solves.
Why ? Any technical reason beside your dislike for containers, in this specific scenario ?
Remember that we are talking about software that probably is built with older version of the OS as target, using older version of tools and libraries. The source code could not be compilable anymore without a porting, which can be not that easy.
It depends on your objective.
If the goal is to be able to continue to play a game which require a server, having the publisher to release a container solve your problem, you just run it and you can continue to play the game, which if I am not wrong is the ultimate goal of all the Stop Killing Games initiative.
If the publisher only give you the server binary (and all the dependencies) there is way to be sure that the next OS update does not break something, assuming you are able to run it in the first place.
The source code you say ? Fine, when the copyright end, after 70 years, they will release it in the public domain, until then… good luck, laws are on their side.
Because jailing a container is even harder than jailing an application. “But a container is already jailed” you’ll say - I don’t trust any jail that I can’t choose & configure myself.
How about: document the requirements for the execution environment (in industry this is called an interface definition document), based on which the gaming community can then generate their own container configs if they like, but no one has to run stuff in a container.