[Freeciv-Dev] Re: game engine / rapid prototyping mentality

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 04:51:19PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> That kind of problem would be easily solved if you guys viewed Freeciv
> as a game engine, not a highly specific game that you intend to keep
> playing Gatekeeper about.  When you say "feel free to go off and make
> your own version, it's GPL," you're not facilitating people.  *I* can do
> it, I have the skills, discipline, and time to do it singlehandedly.
> But most people cannot.  Your close-mindedness to stuff other than The
> Committee's One True Way To Play Freeciv hurts other people's ability to
> reuse your code.

I don't understand this.  If "The Committee" could adapt FreeCiv to your
vision, why could someone else not do so as well?  They have no special
powers, no hidden code.  Every person that could possibly contribute
code to the freeciv.org FreeCiv could also contribute code to their own
FreeCiv.  Every person that could fix the freeciv.org FreeCiv could also
fix their own FreeCiv, and there's nothing that anybody -- including the
freeciv.org people -- could do to stop it.

Morever, that's as it should be, and that's healthy.  In fact, if memory
serves, that is how FreeCiv came to be updated after the Great Danes no
longer had time to update it like people wanted.

It also happens countless other places.  The gcc compiler was
stagnating, so some people wrote egcs, which later was folded into the
gcc mainline.  Alan Cox maintains his own kernel.  The OpenBSD project
is more or less a periodically-updated fork of NetBSD.  And, of course,
NetBSD pulls back in code from OpenBSD that suits them.

I'm a developer for Debian.  There are probably a dozen Debian forks out
there right now, including names like Progeny and Knoppix.  These are
from people that thought that one aspect or another of Debian sucked, so
they decided to fix it for themselves.  For instance, a lot of people
think that Debian's installer sucks.  That may be (while it doesn't do
hardware autodetection, the rest of it is pretty decent, considering the
incredible array of platforms it has to run on), or maybe not.  But they
decided to do something about it.  And hey, that's great.  The needs of
Grandma are different than those of someone installing it on an
AlphaServer, and Debian is not a great distro for Grandma.

Point is, you've got good ideas.  I don't know enough to know whether
they're crap or not right now.  But that doesn't matter.  If the FreeCiv
"committee" thinks they're crap, that matters not one iota to you, the
developer.  You simply write the code as you normally would, then say
"hey, check out my BetterFreeciv over here."  Who knows, maybe people
will see the light after there's code.

> Actually, from *that* standpoint, your code is completely useless to me.
> I can't sell a game commercially based on GPL code.  First time sold,
> someone redistributes the source, boom!  Profit gone.  And even if your

Hmm, the point of the GPL is keeping greedy thieves from stealing code
and not giving their end users the same freedoms that were given to
them.

So you LIKE stealing code now?

Oh, it's just *designs* that you don't like stealing...

Mark me down as nonplussed.

> er, I mean the *Civ II* game design, so what's left?  Just some
> multiplayer network code.  That might be useful under a LGPL or BSD
> license, but certainly not worth a GPL poisoning.
> 
> Why?  Because I love the 4X TBS genre.  And I *hate* the stagnation in
> the genre.  I hate it so much, I'm writing Ocean Mars.

But not releasing it as GPL?  In that case, I'll never use it.  Because
1) it is exceedingly unlikely that it will work on my platform, and 2)
because if something about it sucks, *I* can't fix it like I can with
FreeCiv, and if you disagree about it sucking, then I'm stuck.

> I've played *lots* of Freeciv now.  Aside from multiplayer, what do you
> think I don't know?

That's like saying "Aside from the United States, Canada, and Mexico,
I've been all over North America."

> Ok, haul out your Dilbert cartoon books.  The disease you have is called
> the Paralysis Of Analysis.  You are thinking, not doing.  Take *ONE* of
> these anti-ICS ideas and *DO* it.  *Fork* the code into a prototype
> version.  If it doesn't work, forget about it, try something else.

Funny, that is exactly what you have refused to do.

> That's the mentality I'd like to see from you guys.  Not talk, action!

Funny, that's the mentality I've been trying to encourage from you.