Thoughts and concerns on FLOSS code, assets, and homebrew games [rambling]

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Free Software, Open Source, GPL, Creative Commons, etc. etc.  People love it, people hate it, people scratch their head and say "what's it all about?"  I figure this is a pretty decent place to bring it up since the Doom source release means there are people here who find it relevant with, perhaps, fewer of the, uh, extreme types being in residence.  This is going to be rambly and maybe a bit incoherent much as my thoughts on these matters are, though I'm doing what I can to organize it out somewhat.  Picture a "*hits blunt*" here as needed, heh.

 

For some context to my interest in this sort of stuff, my interest mainly comes from two sources, as a daily Linux user and as someone messing around with the idea of making homebrew games and utilities mostly for oldschool systems that are pretty niche interest (though porting any such to Linux is not an unreasonable thought either).  So I find myself wondering both, whether I should borrow from vast pool of extant GPL code (and thus bind myself to releasing the projects that do such borrowing as GPL) and if I do go the "write it yourself" route how or if I ought to release that code (mostly I've gone with MIT license for existing code projects, since it's simple and to the point and I hate long reams of legalese).  Likewise for assets and stuff.

 

Now I've flip-flopped a lot on the topic of Free software and ten years ago I was rather much of a FLOSS zealot myself.  Nowadays I use Linux for some things, Windows for some things, whatever works.  A big part of my backing off from the more hard-line contingent is the degree to which I've grown to dislike a lot of things about the FLOSS community at large.  Yeah, Doom community has its own "Holy Wars" of which we're well aware (and which often grow tiresome in their own right) but it just seems like the ones among FLOSSers are both more vehement and more petty a lot of the time.  I suppose I shouldn't tar everyone there with the same brush but it seems like an area where there's a lot of toxicity going around, which seems all the more jarring when you consider it's supposed to be based around sharing and communal benefit.  Stallman waxes nostalgic for the days when people swapped code around and modified it to their heart's content without worrying about copyrights and such but that picture of freewheeling innocence seems far removed from the copyright-obsessed and sometimes paranoid attitudes I see crop up around Free-licensed stuff nowadays.  Not that the caution is always unjustified, like that time Freedoom had to purge a bunch of music tracks that turned out to be stolen.  Still it's offputting when "did you steal this?" is one of the first things that comes up on new contributions.  Then there are people who act proprietary about stuff that they've put under a Free license, expect you should explicitly ask permission to use it despite that, or seem to dislike it being used.  Do they even understand the principle of the thing when they released it that way?  I mean, I remember when Creative Commons was a big new thing their whole promotional line was "You don't have to ask for permissions because permission has already been granted".  Actually, I suppose that is a problem with some of these projects, seems like people come along and want to contribute without really understanding what the whole FLOSS thing means.  Even the idgames uploader thing now seems to apply a CC license to things when I doubt many people understand the implications of that.  On another note I also dislike the pressures to use a "real" name, I'm a private person and you can know me by my handle, thank you very much.

 

Free code vs. Free assets.  Code is like a tool, it serves a practical purpose and there are only so many designs you can make a good tool in and have it do that purpose well.  I'm all for code being open-source and reusable whenever possible.  But things like graphics, music, those let in a lot more matter of taste and aesthetics to the equation and I'm less certain that the idea of allowing free modification and reuse benefits them.  We know reused assets can come off as kind of cheap.  You can see it here in the realm of Doom modding when people complain about how "sprite X is overused" or how the Realm667 repository is a bane on Doom mods.  Sure, if you look at stuff from id and Raven you can see that they re-used their assets sometimes.  That tan rock from Wolfenstein 3-D passed through Doom 2, Quake and even Quake 2 in various edited forms.  A few Heretic textures carried over to Hexen, a few Hexen textures show up in Mageslayer, etc.  But all those projects used a majority of new assets so that mitigated the effect some.  Having unique assets can play a big part of making a game feel like something different and interesting, just look at projects like Freedoom etc. that bank on the notion that a different set of assets equals a different game even if it's working on the same existing rule set.  While I think that it can be beneficial to have assets offered in a FLOSS manner, it seems to me like they're much less likely to be used effectively than FLOSS program code is, and possibly in ways that make the initial project have less impact.  Then again, I've seen the point raised about Wolfenstein 3-D mods where people just copy-paste code without really understanding it so I suppose that's an example of how shared code can be poorly applied too.

 

Then there's the question of selling it.  Probably the most major thing that I look askance at in the whole FLOSS licensing thing is the "anyone's allowed to sell it" aspect.  Seems kind of skeevy that someone can get paid for someone else's work and never give the actual author a cut.  But then, I'm well aware of how D!ZONE and all those other compilations made a buck off of random people's PWADs, or how Apogee stole graphics from other games and got away with it, or how any number of dodgy "indie" games, bootleg carts and what have you nowadays are doing much the same thing.  So closed source is certainly no guarantee of not getting ripped off this way, but I don't know, just seems like explicitly allowing it would encourage such.  The usual response I've seen is "get the jump on them and sell it yourself then" which seems like a fair enough answer if the project's 100% original content, I guess, but as soon as it's a project that's brought in other resources it gets thorny, since then you're either left figuring out giving something back to everyone who's contributed something, or else being the one taking money for other people's work yourself.  Ugh.

 

Ultimately I suppose a lot of this could be a moot point and overthinking things, I don't know.  I'm just a small-time hobbyist, any profit I could possibly make off of any of this stuff would be a bonus to stuff I'm doing for fun.  I have little interest in being a part of, and in most cases actively dislike, the modern mainstream gaming industry.  I'm neither a lawyer nor do I particularly care to have to deal with one I'm not being forced to.  So whatever I might license my stuff as, if someone misuses it I'd probably at most just shake my head and say "well, that's a dick move and that guy is a dick."

 

Share some thoughts and stuff.

[kb1]

It is a concept that requires some thought. Free software has become so prevalent that the idea of having closed, or even getting paid for your software seems strange to some. Which is bizarre: A programmer writing a program is supposed to give it all away for free, but a musician should get royalties each time his song is played? Major double standard.

 

Id Software did it right: Make the bulk of your money, then give away the source, but still charge for the assets. They could have just as easily charged for the source, and gave away the assets, but, I think John Carmack actually wanted to help out young programmers, and, maybe even be able to play some of their creations. And, he actually was able to take the community's creations and turn around and sell them all over again, which is kinda cool.

 

Typically, I also expect to get paid for my programming services - that's my profession, after all. If I worked hard on it, why shouldn't I get paid? With Doom, and the like, it is different: It's supposed to be a 2-way street, whereas we can all give AND take, thereby benefitting each other. It's not just about taking software: You're supposed to release your versions too.

 

I think it's really sad how programmers, especially young ones devalue their work as much as they do. Is there really any other profession where you're expected to give away your hard work for free?

 

I think the bad attitudes you might notice are simply a product of having too many cooks, spoiling the soup. You simply have no way in to hear about such attitudes in closed projects.

 

As far as code vs. resources go, I find it silly that the images and music are considered "art", but the code is just code. Why isn't the code also "art"? It can be constructed very beautifully, with care.

 

[Jon]

The company I work for (Red Hat) makes billions of dollars a year developing open source software, much of it GPL licensed.

 

in chocolate doom, the platform that needs the most hand-holding for proper midi playback is windows.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

21 hours ago, kb1 said:

It is a concept that requires some thought. Free software has become so prevalent that the idea of having closed, or even getting paid for your software seems strange to some. Which is bizarre: A programmer writing a program is supposed to give it all away for free, but a musician should get royalties each time his song is played? Major double standard.

Dunno, there's plenty of music you can listen to for free too, although it's usually not offered for libre usage the same way it is with a lot of code.

 

22 hours ago, kb1 said:

Id Software did it right: Make the bulk of your money, then give away the source, but still charge for the assets. They could have just as easily charged for the source, and gave away the assets, but, I think John Carmack actually wanted to help out young programmers, and, maybe even be able to play some of their creations. And, he actually was able to take the community's creations and turn around and sell them all over again, which is kinda cool.

Good point.  A handful of other old games that companies have written off get released to be played for free, but not any source code or anything like that.  Although I suspect in many of those cases they're games that weren't commercially successful in the first place and the makers figured they could at least use to drum up a little goodwill.

 

21 hours ago, kb1 said:

As far as code vs. resources go, I find it silly that the images and music are considered "art", but the code is just code. Why isn't the code also "art"? It can be constructed very beautifully, with care.

I suppose things like demoscene programs and the like have an "arty" side to coding, but in most cases, the end user isn't going to care at all about how clever or "beautiful" the code is under the hood.  They're never going to see that, they're only going to care about whether it works the way it is supposed to (even with open source, how many who use the program actually look at the code?  A minority I suspect).  Though there's some truth to that "ugly" code is often also buggy code.

 

11 minutes ago, Jon said:

The company I work for (Red Hat) makes billions of dollars a year developing open source software, much of it GPL licensed.

 

in chocolate doom, the platform that needs the most hand-holding for proper midi playback is windows.

Interesting.  Where does all that money come from?  I always used to think the whole "selling technical support for FLOSS programs" seemed like a big joke, since who would pay for that when they can look answers up online, but maybe there's more demand for that than I assumed?

 

I'm fairly surprised regarding MIDI playback as well, given what an ordeal MIDI support on Linux seems like on the user end compared to Windows.

[kb1]

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Dunno, there's plenty of music you can listen to for free too, although it's usually not offered for libre usage the same way it is with a lot of code.

There's nothing wrong with the occasional freebie, or even promoting your new album. But, you know, if I'm enjoying someone's music, I *want* to compensate them for the hard work and joy that they provide. If an artist of any kind is always giving it away, they are devaluing themselves, I believe. The same is true for any medium. If it's worth enjoying, it's worthy of compensation.

 

 

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

 

Good point.  A handful of other old games that companies have written off get released to be played for free, but not any source code or anything like that.  Although I suspect in many of those cases they're games that weren't commercially successful in the first place and the makers figured they could at least use to drum up a little goodwill.

I think Id Software really knocked the socks off of the industry by releasing their source. They weren't the first, but maybe the first to release a product of that caliber. Many companies are *still* afraid of giving away their secrets.

 

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

I suppose things like demoscene programs and the like have an "arty" side to coding, but in most cases, the end user isn't going to care at all about how clever or "beautiful" the code is under the hood.  They're never going to see that, they're only going to care about whether it works the way it is supposed to (even with open source, how many who use the program actually look at the code?  A minority I suspect).  Though there's some truth to that "ugly" code is often also buggy code.

The 'beautiful code' comments were more geared towards the developers being the recipients of the source code. There is an art to coding, and it goes way beyond proper naming, indenting, and commenting. For example, there are beautiful algorithms: concise, robust functions that perform specific tasks efficiently, safely, securely. There are ways to write code that is highly error-resistant, and/or easily reusable in many projects. Often, with beautiful code, you can tell that it works, based solely on how it's written. It's difficult to describe...it has something to do with pride of workmanship. A good programmer knows it when he/she sees it. It's not "how many widgets can you produce per hour." Coding requires a lot of skills, but also an imagination, coupled with the ability to transcribe that imagination onto a medium where it can be understood by others. That's what makes it a form of art.

 

[fraggle]

18 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Interesting.  Where does all that money come from?  I always used to think the whole "selling technical support for FLOSS programs" seemed like a big joke, since who would pay for that when they can look answers up online, but maybe there's more demand for that than I assumed?

Not a myth at all. Bear in mind that "just look up the answers online" might seem like a reasonable strategy if you're a technically competent person working in a small company of five people, but larger companies are going to want something more concrete. There's an old (rather cynical) saying that "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing". If you don't want the expense of having to hire a dedicated full-time Linux expert then paying a professional company to provide it for you is probably a good investment.

[insertwackynamehere]

Free software is a net positive and I’m a huge fan of it, albeit from the Apache/MIT/BSD side versus the GPL side which I view as dogmatic and overly hippyish. That being said I still respect GPL/GNU/Stallman etc, I just don’t agree with a lot of the principles.

 

Open source is the backbone of modern cutting edge development. You can run web applications using frameworks, server OSes and compilers as well as browsers all of which are free and open source. It drives innovation and billion dollar corporations know this. Every tech company is open to open source to some degree whether it’s using it or giving back to it (usually both). It’s probably the best example to date of how selfish interests can still benefit everyone (almost like some sort of prisoners dilemma setup except where the prisoners act “correctly”) given that it has real buy in from companies who do not care about open source principles beyond the bottom line but recognize the benefits anyway (MS, Apple, etc).

 

As a developer there’s something fun about finding bugs or submitting patches to open source projects I use. It feels fulfilling and I suspect that’s the way it feels for most given the success it has.