I would like to make a small call to everyone developing community tools for AMS2: career modes, livery managers, race generators, modding tools, custom championship tools, telemetry apps, and so on and so forth. Please consider making them free and open source. It is frustrating to see essentially the same application being created a dozen times in different, incomplete ways. One version has a good interface but lacks an important feature. Another supports more options but is abandoned. Another almost does what you need, but is buggy and anyone except the original author can fix or extend it. Eventually, every project starts again from zero. Open source would allow us to build on each others work instead. If the original developer loses interest, someone else can continue it. Users can fix small problems, add support for Linux or new game versions, translate the interface, improve compatibility, or adapt the tool to their own particular way of playing, publicly or privately. Even people who cannot program can contribute with testing, documentation, pictures for UI, or ideas. This does not mean that every project needs to become a huge collaborative effort, or that developers must provide permanent support. Quite the opposite: publishing the source removes some of that burden. You can release something useful, document its current state, and let others improve it if they want. We as a community would benefit much more from a few shared, extensible foundations than from dozens of closed applications that repeatedly solve 70% of the same problem and then disappear. So, if you are making one of these tools, please consider putting the code on GitHub or a similar platform, choosing a proper free-software license, and allowing the community to help. Your unfinished project may be exactly the foundation somebody else needs. If you want to monetize the app you can still release the code, free as in freedom (that most of the time is a synonym of open source) does not mean free as in free beer.
People are even stealing liveries and reupload them as if they were their own without asking for any permission or giving any credit. It's fair to pass the torch if you're really about to abandon what you've build, but honestly I wouldn't trust people on the internet so much that I would upload all my sourcecode for free as long as I'm active working on it or plan to support it. The modding community in AMS2 is great though, creators are already sharing and colloborating where it fits to save time.
I've dozens and dozens of open source projects on my GitHub and in general love the idea of sharing. However I've seen with my own eyes what @Ace said above and it makes me sick when people do that. So I kinda understand why someone would gatekeep something they've put 100s of hours in, and try to protect it from blatantly being stolen and used as their own. The worse cases were from entirely free software that some sold for profit. It's disgusting.
