Demoscene started on the 8bit world and as the PC world started focusing on MS-DOS, so did the coders.
As one of the goals of the demoscene was to see which groups were able to push the machine to the limits while minimizing the amount of code, the used algorithms were worth gold and thus kept secret.
So open source was a foreign word in the demoscene universe and everyone was happily coding the latest demo, instead of getting alternative OS to run on their PCs.
Demoscene started on the 8bit world and as the PC world started focusing on MS-DOS, so did the coders.
As one of the goals of the demoscene was to see which groups were able to push the machine to the limits while minimizing the amount of code, the used algorithms were worth gold and thus kept secret.
So open source was a foreign word in the demoscene universe and everyone was happily coding the latest demo, instead of getting alternative OS to run on their PCs.