I want EST Soft to release the source code for Cabal's game client *and* server as open source. If they did I'd be willing to commit 5 to 10 **free** hours of work per week or so on said source.

Beyond that, I think it would also be prudent for EST to be more forthcoming about their server architecture and invite suggestions for improvement on that from the community as well.

I can see a couple knee jerk reactions to this:

- Won't people just start making their own private servers? Yes, I'm sure they would. Are you denying that private Cabal servers already exist?
- If there are private servers with official up to date Cabal servers, won't that leech money from EST? Maybe a little. But I can guarantee the quality of Cabal's client/server are *not* why people play Cabal. The in-game market and community momentum matter much, much more. Also people are already invested (both time and money wise) in Cabal NA/EU/etc, and switching to a private server would feel like "starting over".
- How will we stop the h4x0rz? There are many ways to verify with the server that a client hasn't been tampered with. Not all of them need to be proprietary, but it certainly is easier if they are so that aspect of the client or server need not be open source even if the rest of the program is.

There are also a few case studies:

- Reddit's site is open source (https://github.com/reddit/reddit). How many people running Reddit's *exact* source are pulling over 15 million unique visitors a month? Zero.
- Facebook releases information about its server architecture (http://www.opencompute.org/). How many Facebook clones have over 1 billion active users? Zero.
- Apple releases the kernel of its operating system (http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/), and a lot of its core technologies (compiler (http://opensource.apple.com/source/clang/), rendering engine (http://www.webkit.org/), etc). I'm sure Apple's nearly 700 billion dollar market cap speaks for itself.

I really just want Cabal to stop having as many issues related to simple software bugs. And each new release doesn't have to break in novel ways.