The situation around one of the most anticipated games today, Half-Life 2, just got a little bit more interesting.. The source code was stolen.

This sucks in more ways than I could list. Sure, someone might actually be able to make a better mod because of this, but more likely it will cause security problems with network play, more trojans against gamers, licensing problems for Valve (affecting their revenue and, as a result, future games), etc etc. I am really sympathetic for the guys there, because if the same happened to us, we'd be really pissed off about it. Whoever did this deserves to get caught and punished, hard.

That said, ultimately the company could have prevented it by paying more attention to security. That's what really sucks - I can imagine the situation they're in, working damn hard to get the game out, and at the same time someone should always be looking out for holes in their systems, being really anal-retentive about access to systems that have source code on them. Because that work really is no fun. That's one of the things I should be working on here, and it's really, really difficult to find the time to do it - and most times making things safer means taking away something useful from someone's toolchest. All this because the world is full of assholes. :(

Good luck, Valve! I wish you success with the release.