Some months back, I made a joke statement on a tf.tv post
Just another reason why F/OSS games are superior to closed-source proprietary games.
Some users then argued with me that making anticheat systems FOSS would cause more problems. I conditionally disagreed with them at the time.
Today, I visited that posted again and I laughed at the past chaos; but now I am curious: Should anticheat systems be F/OSS?
The point of Libre software is that the user has control over it. Anti-cheat software is explicitly designed to control the user (i.e. to prevent them from cheating) and thus can’t realistically be Libre. You can argue that preventing cheaters is a desirable outcome for the game’s population but it stands that anti-cheat must be proprietary in order to work.
A compromise could be if the game is mostly Libre but has a proprietary anti-cheat module that is necessary to play with other anti-cheat-enabled players/servers. If you don’t care about anti-cheat you can just remove the module.