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.

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[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.