Since ProtonDB is proprietary and also directly linked with Steam games instead of any game possible, I was looking around for open source alternatives to it. I found Are we anti cheat yet which is pretty cool but it’s limited just to the anti cheat working or not, and also PC Gaming wiki which is for all games but no longer for Linux compatibility in specific, so the answers are also much more vague.
Is there anything I haven’t discovered? It seems like there’s no good alternative to it currently, not even one that just lacks user input.
The data being publicized isn’t enough to call it open source, if someone decided to create a foss app that copies over new records from the ProtonDB database every night for example, you would still have a diverging dataset if you allow people to insert new records in the new app, and the ProtonDB owners could just decide to not export that data any longer whenever they want.
That could also be true if it were open source, but I’d say it’s much more likely to happen when the main parts of it are proprietary.
You also can’t change the data being Steam specific when the app is closed source and not accepting contributions, a foss app could become as broad or as specific as the community needs it to be.
It is certainly not open source, but it is a copy left license.
You could make the exact same argument for literally any open source project where someone forks it.
The “power” of open source is that in theory if the creator went rogue that the public can switch to the fork as the main app used.
I really fail to see if the dataset is open, how the data itself (of course not the web domain or front end) would be any different in a fully open source project. Maybe the transfer to a new app in the last case would be quicker, but that is about it. The dataset is the gold here.