I was thinking more along the lines of its not open source to keep their oopses a secret.

I mean I've only ever written one thing that I've released which no one cared about thankfully as I had offered to release the source for it if there was interest. I was too ashamed of the coding to release it initially. And that was a super simple little thing.

An open source version of GOG Galaxy would be nice. Even if GOG released a official Linux version of the Galaxy client, thinking there would be similar limitations for "official GOG Linux Galaxy support" on Linux distributions.

Unless I am mistaken, GOG's current stance on Linux support is https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212456929-General-questions

Yeah, Galaxy would be able to be compiled on much more distros other than Ubuntu if it were open source.

And Galaxy is effectively Chromium (which is open-source) with a different user interface and an API for managing games made available to Javascript.

In fact, I'd wager that most lines of the Galaxy source is made up of Chromium, and as such are open. Of course, we don't actually know exactly which lines were added, removed, or changed, but Google's git repository for Chromium should cover most of the application.

Irrelevant link. Open Source != GOG giving it up. Doesn't mean they have to accept code from outside parties. It doesn't mean it becomes community-driven. It instead means that others can make things interact/interoperate with Galaxy, or that others could find and report flaws to GOG.
And itch.io is all open source and reportedly about the best release support tools out there anywhere.

Really? Do you have a source to back that up?
With most web apps you can press CTRL + SHIFT + I and a console will open up, like in Discord, but no so for Galaxy.

Perhaps they removed that function? Iunno.

I'll install the application in a wine prefix and look for signs of Chromium as we go...

Sign 1, the license agreement, shown on installation: Sign 2, multiple files referring to chrome or chromium embedded framework: Sign 3, UI files only work in Chromium-based browsers:
Well, it is mostly a web browser without a URL bar -as evident from the HTML files that depicts the UI-, and practically no one makes a browser-based application based on anything other than Chrome nowadays (also, no one makes their own browser from scratch any more - even Microsoft quit the browser race and adopted Chrome as a base). Opening the local pages (say web/main.html or web/settings.html) in Firefox or Pale Moon makes it look like garbage while Chromium shows the layout correctly (of course no actual content, as that's added through custom functions), so yeah, they're build specifically to be viewed in a Chromium-based application. See attached images for screenshots of Chromium and Firefox.

I could probably go through a few files with a hex editor to look for more signs, but I can't really be arsed to do that at the moment.

True, but they could also just as easily f*ck it up somehow....especially if various contributors/devs don't communicate between one another properly.

Also, it'd likely lead to a mass amount of competing forks(as we have with a dozen or more flavors of linux/etc), which would be confusing to keep up with for some people.

Not really since Galaxy would be advertised on the GOG website.
That's pretty interesting.
I guess if it's truly just a bit of an edit of Chromium then it shouldn't be that difficult to port to Linux? I wonder what the hold up is...

They don't care and don't want to allocate more than 0 resources to it, that's all.
Anyone who doesn't care about forks would just use the official version from GOG.

Anyone who wants something else will consider these forks a feature.

But "mass amount of competing forks" is just FUD, the vast majority of free / open source software has no forks (and most of the forks that do actually exist tend to be really obscure and you don't hear much of them anywhere ever unless you really look for them). Well, they have what certain repo hosting sites may call forks, but these are forks in a slightly different meaning of the word.

Forks also lead to innovation usually. Take for example OpenMW, which has a fork called Tes3MP which is focussed on implementing multiplayer. The OpenMW team have already announced that they are planning to implement Tes3MP into the OpenMW as a feature later on.

Also it's quite sad that GOG doesn't care about Linux because quite a lot of Linux users know about GOG. I thought the GOG team would be closer to the community than steam but I guess not, since a few years ago they replied to forum posts but now I don't see them doing that anymore. It's as if GOG is going downhill, introducing games with DRM (mostly multiplayer DRM) and pushing Galaxy aggressively.

Yea, linuxvangog appears to be gone, and I haven't heard from Judas in a long time. It's been years since we were promised the Linux version of 2033, but apparently it's been withheld due to technical issues (yet on Steam, the Linux version is just fine). And a fair number of games are coming out with either crippled or no Linux support at all on GOG due to Galaxy bullshit.

Honestly I wouldn't endorse GOG as a good choice for any Linux gamer.

Yeah I might switch back to steam, they have annoying ass DRM but at least they do something for the Linux community.

Given that many often download stuff from shady sites thinking it's the legit/official build/file/etc, I have my doubts as to some of that.

Too many forks also leads to faction forming/fighting between factions(and fans of each), spreading thin of available devs/resources, etc.

As for linux, not to be too rude, but: If linux was more user friendly/designed as such & more popular maybe companies would be more willing to support it? As of now, it(and it's forks) are mostly unfeasible targets for devs(especially those who only have money/time to port to the OSs/etc with the biggest userbases).

I mean I don't need Galaxy to be open source if I wanted to run a shady site that distributes Galaxy and sideloads malware. I could do that right now.