[Freeciv-Dev] Change and Freeciv [Was: Documentation, Usability and Development]

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:03 PM 01/11/28 -0500, Justin Moore wrote:
>   Plus I'd like some more general feedback about the laundry list of
>ideas I threw out in my rant (other than just Christian and Andrew).  Are
>people very comfortable with what we have, or are there others that feel
>we can make this much much better?

We can make it better, but not in the current environment. Your list has 
a lot of very good ideas, but only a few of them will probably ever get
the chance or attention to mature and bloom fully :-).

In economic terms, maintainers have a monopoly with a mature product and
are not likely to seek to change or give up their current market power.
They are the MicroSoft and you are a Linux upstart/startup. There will
be all sorts of arguments about rocking the boat, overloading the 
current system (which isn't really broken, just maybe in need of a minor
tuneup), or the lack of existing resources (note new ones need a long
time to train into trustworthy monopolists) and the general scariness 
of what might happen in a brave new world of change.

In large measure the market (read the players) likes to standardize on 
a single flavour like this and does not want change except in trivial
feature additions that are easy to absorb. There are a lot of players
that treat Freeciv as nothing more than a smallpoxish Empire or WarCraft 
variant rather than a multi-facetted strategy game - and that is really
about what it is as most of the non-military strategy elements like trade, 
diplomacy are incomplete, while new features that get in are things like
watchtower. If the market really wants a Microsoft Freeeciv, then a Linux 
variant is doomed.

In biological terms there is a dominant species or eco-system that is
basically stifling any new system from being established to threaten it.

A reset like dinosaur extinction, i.e. start of Freeciv 2.0 (which will
require a year or so of dedicated development in peace in a protected 
niche) may be required to restart diversity in the evolutionary process.

If you really like opportunity for diversity and change, then get behind
the next Freeciv development spinoff that bases itself on an Application 
Framework approach where 90% of the code is generic modular template,
and variants like FreecivAC, TeamFreeciv or Freeciv III are customizable
data packages, or managed by a small number of loadable modules. Also
look for something in a higher level language than C where this sort of
development is aided by the language/tools.

But besides a revolutionary turnover, another way is to seed the dominant 
species with a few evolutionary pathogens and attempt to isolate the 
mutants in a number of carefully controlled enclaves until it is clear 
that one is becoming the next evolutionary dominant species. The 
advantage of this from the Freeciv maintainer perspective is that during 
the mutation process, there may still be opportunity for crossbreeding
and hence the dominant species may be able to selectively mutate itself
into the next evolutionary phase and survive. But this sort of 
enlightened attitude to change is very rare :-).

Also realize that mutants are often sterile. The general trend to stick
with the current norm is not a *bad* species strategy. Mutants really
need to work harder to prove themselves worthy of general survival.

>-jdm
>
>Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129
>Email:  justin@xxxxxxxxxxx

Cheers,
RossW
=====