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Not sure what qualifies as 'highly successful', 'from the start', etc. but Mindustry[0] is GPL, is actively updated, accepts and includes contributions from third parties and is available commercially.
[0] https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry
It's tough. In my experience in the games industry, a big reason source wasn't released historically was not antagonism towards the players or belief in the underlying IP. It was fear: someone in "China" would start running your game for "their" audience, and make a bundle there while you rot, totally unknown to you.
I'm not sure how often that actually happened. The only games with parallel universe East Asian audiences belonged to #1 genres like MOBAs. While there was a belief that you could be making the next MOBA, hardly anyone was making realtime multiplayer games at all, so it was extremely unlikely.
It was a misplaced reaction to Ketchapp, the real antagonist. They would rapidly clone and blitz-market games. Indie mobile developers spent a year or more discovering and refining an original, fun mechanic, only to see this well capitalized seize their audience by giving the mechanic away for free. From 2014 to 2018, in my opinion, indie mobile developers transitioned to more atmospheric fare, and iOS and Android nowadays are a marketing-and-sizing tool for your inevitable Nintendo Switch audience.
Which brings us back to: what is there exactly to protect? Ketchapp didn't need the source code to clone those games. Nobody needs the source. If you make a PC game and have an audience, it will show up in Steam charts, you can't really keep that secret. And if you don't have an audience, you have seriously nothing to worry about. Since every game usually starts at zero, why protect the source?
My card game Spellsource has been open source for a long time (https://github.com/hiddenswitch/Spellsource) and my colleague and I are in the process of rebooting it. This game is community authored, players write the cards, so it makes mechanical sense to be open source. On the flip side, for the narrative & atmospheric single player experiences indie developers are authoring, it is hard to define what they have to gain.
SCUMM VM is now like that, plenty of Point and Click games https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm