Honestly I don't think the problem is how old Simutrans is or whether paksets can be considered source code or not. The problem is the lack of "license culture" of the Simutrans' community in the past. Had the paksets be properly licensed, we wouldn't be wasting time discussing this. Even more, had they be licensed under a more restrictive libre license like the GPL, we wouldn't have problems with derivative works switching license like the pak64.german did... But it's useless to complain now, and things have improved nowadays like the licenses of pak192 and pak256 show.
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In the beginning (1997 ~ 2006/2007) Simutrans was just freeware. The source files of the program and the graphics sets were not public.
Then it was decided to make the program code publicly available. But there is an opinion that there must also be a license.
[edit]This was a requirement by the Debian developers to be included in the Debian repo.[/edit]Only to put something under a license or to change it later all authors have to agree. And there is the problem because many authors are no longer available. Therefore, much is subject to copyright.
And the copyright is interpreted quite differently, depending on the country in which the author is at home.
In 1997 Linux was still in its infancy. Since then, however, there have been many discussions about licenses in the Linux environment. Apart from that, there were some licenses that didn't exist today.
And then there is the fact that people don't participate just because something has a license that they don't like.
I have been following the Simutrans development for a long time. And I've found that since it's been OpenSource, the error messages related to the graphics sets have decreased significantly. This does not necessarily have to have to do with it, since society also changes due to other influences. In any case, there were significantly more activities up to 2010 than in the past 10 years. That should also be a reason why a lot of information is out of date because nobody has been found who updates the information. Or many point a finger at others who should please do it instead of participating themselves.
A mosaic consists of many small stones. That means that even small contributions create something big.
Even if forums are favored in the exchange of information, information is out of date there because only the poster creator and a few moderators can update it. In contrast, wikis offer the possibility that everyone can add and update information. But a wiki is also out of date if no one is involved in maintenance.
