Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...

From: "Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>

Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 05:31:42 +0000

"Paul Walker" <arafel@spamcop.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:slrn8vk4ja.3vh.arafel@nova.blacksun.org.uk...
> On 17 Oct 2000 19:29:42 GMT, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>
> >source might actually help. For example if you are getting help with
> >the source from other people, you can get bug fixes or new features
without
> >giving up as much of your own time, which can be used to do the creative
> >tasks which are what really makes your game.
>
> In theory, yes. In practice, ask most free software authors how many
> contributions they get. If it's not a high-profile project, I suspect
you'll
> find the answer is "very few".

We have not opened up the source for Eressea, partly because we want to
avoid licensing issues, mostly because it contains secrets that should be
kept hidden from the players and it''s not yet modular enought to split
rules from engine.

But my experience with free software isn't the best either: All the tools
we've written (map tool, orders checker, order template generator, a
versatile parser) were released in source and under GPL or similar licenses.
Although there've been around 5-6000 players in the last 4 years, I can
count on one hand the number of submissions from players - and those were
mostly of the "there's a zero there that should be a one" kind, nothing big.

There has been one notable exception: I wrote the core classes for a Java
client for Eressea (http://pegasus.upb.de/enno/tools/java.html) which were
accepted by 5 players. There was a simple reason for this, though: Every one
of them said they had always wanted to get some practice writing java, or
needed to learn it for school, etc. The project has found one really strong
coder who is doing about 98% of the work these days, the other four seem to
have stopped developing after they learned all tehy wanted. So it wasn't
really a "giving something back" kind of reasoning that motivated them, but
rather "It'll help ME".

The end result is cool. But it's no different from the other clients in that
it's maintained by a single person, and he gets hardly any help in the form
of code submississions. He does get several bug reports and feature requests
a week, however.

Enno.

References

Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...
bruno@cerberus.csd.uwm.edu (Bruno Wolff III)
Tue, 17 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...
tim@leaphome.pelican.org (Tim Franklin)
Mon, 16 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 16 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...
MindShift Design <teammsd@mindshiftdesign.com>
Tue, 17 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000