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Terminus Has Gone Gold
michaelsimms writes "According to Vicarious Visions, Terminus has gone gold. CEO Karthik Bala posted the announcement this morning on the fansite Station Terminus. According to the latest news from Gonegold.com, Terminus will begin shipping to suppliers on June 10th! You can pre-order Terminus from the Tux Games Web site." The 'persistent universe' in this game is causing a lot of buzz and interest. I can't wait to play it.
I just want to clear this up before I get too much hate mail about not being able to connect to our servers!
My Freakin Blog
One of the things that separates Terminus from Everquest, and that makes it beautiful, is that Terminus is not a service but a product that allows any old user to set up a persistent universe and allow other people to play within it.
In short, Terminus allows an owner of the game unlimited usage of others "universes", provides the ability to instantiate your own, or to just play solo.
Now, if only some insane fanboys out there would set up a cluster running Termins (is this possible?) so that we could have several hundred people existing the in the same universe. ;-)
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RMS is unquestionably brilliant, but he is not always right; and while I have the utmost respect for his free software ideals, I have extreme difficulty with the zealotry which some of his supporters demonstrate.
Your first assumption is that Linux developers are not Linux users. You assume that a commercial software company's programmers aren't going to give half a damn about the operating system; you assume they're heartless, faceless, interchangeable capitalists.
News flash for you: every one of those assumptions is faulty.
The people who code under Linux, whether it be for pay or for the good of the community, are going to be familiar with Linux and the community spirit which it was built upon. When you demonize the commercial software developers, guess what? You're demonizing people you should be evangelizing to. Your approach is no different from that of any of thousands of fundamentalist Christians who loudly scream that homosexuality is evil--regardless of whether it is or not, it alienates the very people you're trying to reach.
Your second assumption is that it is an us against them situation. How can I put it bluntly?--I consider this to be a sign of immaturity. RMS may well see the intellectual-property issue in black and white, but he does not see people in terms of black and white. He has more wisdom than that.
Your third assumption is that our rules are better, high in fiber, low in saturated fat, and guaranteed low sodium. While I'll be the first to trumpet the virtues of free software, we will not achieve world domination by means of xenophobia. Without exception, every culture in history which has practiced isolationism has had its butt kicked by the cultures which did not. Do you really want the free software community to get our rear end handed to us on a platter? That's what this kind of isolationism and xenophobia will do, make no doubt about it.
If I were a Windows developer who was considering porting something (like, for instance, let's say a science-fiction MMORPG to Linux) I'd take a look at your post and say "good grief! What a strange person. Well, Marketing says there's a contingent of them who will buy games anyway, so I'll just ignore all of these Linux zealots!"
As soon as that happens, you have forever lost them to the cause.
Commercial software will not be the demise of Linux. Linux is bigger than that, and more importantly, the community is stronger than that. The only thing that can kill Linux--and destroy free software--is the community surrounding it.
And you're doing ten times as much to destroy free software as any closed-source programmer is.
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