I distinctly remember David Braben discussing a 10-year development cycle after release, after which Frontier would reportedly release server files, empowering the community to host their own games and develop mods.
Then your memory is incorrect, unfortunately.
What was originally said was to reassure those people who thought that backing a server-based game was risky because it might shut down after a couple of years and they'd be back to playing Oolite/FFE again [2]. There were two separate parts of that reassurance, with the first part [1] being said more frequently than the second and in different contexts:
- "We have a ten-year plan for development". This was intended to reassure people that Frontier were in it for the long term, not - as it was later generally interpreted - as a maximum lifespan! With the benefit of hindsight, Frontier were also extremely optimistic about how long features would take to develop, so ten years of clock time is nowhere near enough to implement ten years of that plan. (We're probably about in year 4 of it, to the extent that the original plan is still intact). This statement got made pretty much from the start of the Kickstarter.
- "If the servers are shut down we will release an offline version". There was no statement in this that they would release the actual server code, or release the code in a form which allowed modifications or even multiplayer - a version of the game with a static galaxy and no server dependency [3] is more likely what they meant. Yes, this would be lacking a lot of features, but the audience for the statement was the old FE2/FFE crowd who were used to not having those features anyway. This statement only got made shortly before release when the official offline version was cancelled.
As Elite Dangerous is currently going along in a financially sustainable manner including active development, and Frontier the company appears to be stabilising its finances and returning to moderate profitability, this is still going to be years away from being applicable.
[1] The "ten year" plan was claimed from 2012-2016, and it was never clear if it was a rolling plan or not because this was "vague reassurance" not "detailed business plan", so on that measure it might have ended in 2022 or might still cover out to 2026. Or they might still have one and just stopped mentioning it and it currently runs out to 2035.
[2] If you want a moddable / community-developed game that's a bit like Elite, then both
Oolite (a bit like the original) and
Pioneer (a bit like FE2) are still going and designed to be easily moddable.
[3] There are obvious questions as to whether Frontier, in a position where Elite Dangerous was shut down, would as a company remain sufficiently intact to spend developer time on doing this. It very much depends, I think, on whether their internal development processes have a serverless version for convenience in testing that they could spend a few days repackaging, or whether they'd need to start building one at that point.
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