[Haifux] Open Source Games or the Lack of Them

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Oron!

On Saturday 19 September 2009 10:54:41 Oron Peled wrote:
> On Friday, 18 בSeptember 2009 16:50:38 Shlomi Fish wrote:
> P.S: Shlomi, you've started debating by cross-posting to 3-4 large
>      mailing lists.
>      Cut it out! If you cannot choose the "right" mailing list for a
>      post, just skip it until you do.
> 

Sorry about that. The reason I posted it there was because that's where I 
posted my original "Welcome to Linux vs. Welcome to FOSS" message. I've now 
sent it only to Linux-IL.

> > Since a typical game nowadays costs a lot of money to develop, and
> > requires the collaboration of many people, it seems unlikely that we will
> > see many open-source games that are up-to-par with commercial offerings.
> 
> Rubbish.
> 
> I can still remember when people thought that writing small utilities (e.g:
> a shell) is OK, but a real COMPILER? Out of the question...
> 
> OK, maybe a compiler yes, but a KERNEL? Nah...
> 
> Surely, a full desktop is out of reach of a community effort...
> 
> Hmmmm.... these are all the easy ones. GAMES are the ultimate obstacle.
> No chance to tackle it. We are doomed :-O
> 

Heh. :-)

Well, I can see several problems with what you said. The first is that you're 
assuming that just because it was proven wrong in the past, then it will be 
proven wrong again. This is like saying "We now have air travel, and some 
space travel, etc. so we are going to have time machines and starships too 
because nothing is impossible." However, some tasks may prove to be out of 
reach, and some tasks were proven to be impossible:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

So such past induction may not hold.

As noted in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html the 
economics of games is governed by different rules than standard "shrinkwrap" 
software. And as RMS notes, there is less of an ethical incentive to demand 
that games be completely open-source (art, plots and everything), and he tends 
to be very uncompromising about the freedom of software. (Though some people 
are even worse than him.)

I'd like to see more marketplace games available for Linux, regardless of 
whatever efforts FOSS game developers can do. So we need to ask ourselves - 
what can we do to improve this situation, and how can we convince more game 
makers to make their engines open-source (which means people could run the 
games on any architecture, platform and operating system) while still allowing 
them to limit the open-source nature of the art and plots. "Reality to be 
conquered must be obeyed."

> Shana Tova and may the source be with you.
> 

Shanah Tovah! May valgrind be happy with your C programs, may your Perl 
programs pass strict and warnings, and may your JavaScript code work... 
eventually.

Cheers,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
The Case for File Swapping - http://shlom.in/file-swap

Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.