Tuxracer 1.0 Retail Version Finished

Nailer writes "Tuxracer 1.0 is complete Version 0.6 has been downloaded over a million times, and 1.0 looks like it will kick its older siblings arse. This latest version has a massively improved set of features compared to the earlier versions, including multiplayer support, far more detailed tracks, new hazards (giant boulders, better trees, vehicles, and entire towns with roads, houses, castles, fountains, etc) new players (a girl tux, a funky polar bear, and others), split screen multiplay, internationalization, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff. Take a look at the screenshots and trailer movie. The initial release of the game will be proprietary for Windows and Linux (and perhaps Mac), but some of the code from 1.0 will be released as Open Source. Sunspire are still looking for a publisher, but should be taking direct orders soon. And when they do, I'm buying it."

Comments

FP

[Wiz]

Oh go on!

Sharks

[perlyking]

Are those sharks flopping around on the snow?!?
To be honest the screens dont look to different to what I have played.

Re:Sharks

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a point. It looks to be basically the same thing. Tux races down the hill on his stomach, you try to swerve and get fish. OK. That's fun for about 15 minutes and then you never play it again (at least I haven't). Why would I want to buy that? How about a FPS with Tux?

Open To Closed

[jeriqo]

Too bad it has gone to closed source.. older versions used to be free (as in beer & GPL).

You can still download the source of the 0.61 version directly from their homepage, or from sourceforge

-J

Re:Open To Closed

[dreamchaser]

I understand your sentiment, but it is hard to put food on the table if you give your product away. There is room in this world for both open source and proprietary software.

Of course, I expected to see at least a dozen comments like that. Not everything can be free, guys. People need to live and eat and take care of their families. That being said, open source is here to stay, and as I said above I think it can easily coexist with commercial software.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Games are one of those things that even RMS expects to be proprietary - the real work in a gmae is not usually the engine, but the level design, plot, artwork, etc. Actually, a model that seems to work well is data proprietary, engine GPL, once the game is out of the initial sales period - this has served Id, Outrage, and other companies well.

Re:Open To Closed

[jeriqo]

Being Open source does NOT mean it has to be free ($$).

Both GPL and BSD license allow commercial use of the code.

-J

Re:Open To Closed

[Dwonis]

RMS is full of shit, I bet he never coded a single line

Yes, it's a troll, but I'll bite:

Emacs, GCC, glibc. Any questions?

Re:Open To Closed

[Hobbex]

Games are one of those things that even RMS expects to be proprietary - the real work in a gmae is not usually the engine, but the level design, plot, artwork, etc.

I don't see why this should necessarily be true, I remember some wonderful and freely released TCs (Total Conversions) for Doom and Quake, as well as seemingly endless amounts of levels. The quality of the user made levels and artwork varies, of course, but it's not like that can't be said about Free software.

I think you have differentiate between replayable and non-replayable games. In replayable games, what you see is that a couple of models (like Civilization, and multiplayer Deathmatch) have been stumbled upon that except for technical updates have remained much the same for the last ten years. In Civilization we have seen a free implementation of the concept grow up quite well, and with Deathmatch JC of course GPLed a lot of the code himself - though I am unaware of any attempts to combine the GPLed code with user levels and artwork to make a totally free Quake.

I think that that the real reason that we have not seen a lot of Free games developed is that decent proprietary versions have been around. We have seen time and time again that there aren't often enough coders who are motivated by ethics for free software to thrive when there are propreitary programs available to do the same thing (cf the lack of a free RA decoder, and the bad state of the free Flash player (and Flash is even documented!))

For non-replayable games, the kind that people play through in 10-12 hours and then don't look back to, I might agree that free development might be difficult, at least not for the same amount as come out today. I think the world can do without them.

Re:Open To Closed

[Nurgster]

No, he doesn't.

I've had an at length discussion about this matter with RMS, and his stances is that either the developers write free (using his definition) games (of a lower quality) while working at jobs who pay them to write free applications, or they don't write games at all.

Email me (me@thisisnurgle.org.uk), and I'll forward you the emails if you don't believe me...

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can sell an open source game. You can sell bottled air, too.

Re:Open To Closed

[sydb]

free Flash player

Where?

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL also allow programmers to go hungry while freeloaders use their hard work for free.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/

It is quite old, by now, and not even listd on the main page of the site...

Re:Open To Closed

[flegged]

Here.

Now what would be interesting is a free Flash creator.

Re:Open To Closed

[sg_oneill]

Absolutely.

I honestly and utterly believe that if contributers to that code , who contributed there time (and therefore money) did so in the belief that that code is GPL, than there is no two ways about it;- they are entitled to compensation
, or at least the same rights that they granted the publishers when they submitted their GPL'd submissions

There is nothing more *f_ked up* than putting in work into a community project only to have some renegade company pirate (yes I said *pirate*) your work and make it closed work. Some one *please* call a lawyer. And for god sake if you have a shred of decency , do *NOT* purchase that game.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he should have said...

I'll bet RMS has never held a real job in his whole life. Instead he just sucks off the government teat.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than the program no longer being free(as in beer), what have you lost?

Were you going to look at the source anyway? Did anybody? Probably not.

Re:Open To Closed

[Hobbex]

Oh really, I didn't know Macromedia released a free software flash player. Could you give me a heads up on where the freely distributable and modifiable source code is?

Re:Open To Closed

[sydb]

That one may be zero cost, but it is not Free, which is what the parent poster was stating.

Re:Open To Closed

[Mr. Piccolo]

All crap.

Re:Open To Closed

[sydb]

Thanks, very interesting.

Seems a shame that development is slow / stopped...

Re:Open To Closed

[mobiGeek]

some renegade company pirate (yes I said *pirate*) your work and make it closed work

"Renegade company"? Well, I guess you ignore the fact that Sunspire is the collection of people who created the software, who wrote the overwhelming majority (all?) of the software, designed the overwhelming (all?) of the graphics, sounds, levels...yes, these guys are pirates!

BTW: the games is still Open Sourced.

Re:Open To Closed

[Otter]

No, he doesn't.

I think the original poster was confusing ESR (who IIRC says games are an exception to his claims that Open Source is the best way to do business) with RMS.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick and tired of this pro-commercial line of argument,
"people need to live and eat and take care of their families". If
all this stuff is so important to these people, why don't they do
something that genuinely contributes to society, like farming or
building houses, instead of engaging in a completely made up job
that contributes nothing to anyone except themselves.

If programmers insist on charging money for their wares, why
can't they stand up and admit that it's simply to make themselves
a pot of cash.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

He was an independent consultant (writing Free Software) for many years, until the MacArthur genius grant made that unnecessary.

Re:Open To Closed

[Uncle Warthog]

I don't have any problem with someone trying to put food on the table. I even like the game (though I have to admit that I spend much more of my gaming time with Diablo II).

My problem comes from the apparent bait-and-switch tactic here where the program was released as open source, tested by everyone and their brother who had the (obviously incorrect) impression that it would remain open source, then suddenly the source was closed and a price tag was added. By my lights this is exactly the same cheesy stunt that Sistina pulled with GFS and is the main reason I won't be getting a copy of Tuxracer 1.0.

If Tuxracer's developers had either charged from day one or made it clear that the final version would be a commercial product this wouldn't be an issue for me.

Re:Open To Closed

[Nurgster]

I've also had a breif exchange with ESR about this, and you're right, he is aware that games don't really fit the standard OpenSource model because of all the "non-code assets" (games industry speak) involved.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Games are one of those things that even RMS expects to be proprietary

First of all, this is obviously false.

Second, only the teenage mindset that populates this place could generate this bizarre opinion.

There's nothing magical about video games which make them a special sort of software project, other than the fact that you little jizzstains can grasp what their purpose is. The typical accounting system, for example, is far more expensive to develop and contains just as much non-coding work (business logic, screen design, workflow) as a game. If the GPL fails for games, it fails for pretty much everything non-trivial.

Re:Open To Closed

[GiMP]

GPL'ed Flash player.
http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/

It is the only way to play flash on real computers (ie Irix, PPC-Linux, Solaris)

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Live Video Game chat.. Pretty sweet, over 1000 people chatting online now about the games they love or hate, check it out at www.mygamer.com

Re:Open To Closed

[JollyTX]

So when an open source projects gets _to good_, it's time to start worrying.. it'll soon go commercial!?

Re:Open To Closed

[CleanTroath]

Emacs, GCC, glibc and many others are the time and effort of many people, not just RMS.

Individually, each of the many developers did a very small part of the GNU/Linux. Collectively, they are the ones that produced the entire GNU/Linux (or, by your definition, it would be more in the likes of RMS/Linux). RMS is just a small part of the whole, even if a ratter important part.

Re:Open To Closed

[Unknown Lamer]

I believe you Nurgle. RMS is a man of his ethics--he sticks to them. All software must be Free, including games. Why people call RMS stupid for this...RMS would be stupid if he said "All software must be Free except for games" or something like that. He is simply strong-willed. The fact that he doesn't back down when he believes something is admirable. More people need to say something, and then stand behind that belief instead of backing down at the first attack.

Re:Open To Closed

[salmo]

The GPL does not keep you from charging for your product.

And besides that, it's not like there's a huge market for geek character racing games anyway. How many copies of a game with a penguin sliding down a hill do you think you're going to sell, when I could be playing something a little more interesting for more money. Hell, I can buy kick ass PS1 games for $15 right now.

I'm sure you could get more money in donations, than you could selling the thing. Also you could get sponsors. Let companies buy an opportunity to have their mascot/logo race their way down the track or appear somewhere in the game. That's not against the GPL and seems perfectly reasonable to me.

But most of all don't be a punk and take one of the mascots of free software and throw it in a proprietary game. I think by doing that you just lost most of your market anyway. You going to stick the GNU gnu or a GNOME gnome in there too? It reminds me of all the people selling American flags on the side of the street in late September.

Re:Open To Closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it okay to take money for bread or a car? but its not okay to take money for software ?

Who says it's not OK to take money for software? The FSF even sells Free Software. I recommend actually reading http://www.gnu.org/philosophy before commenting on the FSF's philosophy and RMS's beliefs.

Re:Open To Closed

[Dwonis]

Yes, but RMS did all the boring work that nobody else wanted to do. fileutils, shellutils, and textutils come to mind.

<rant>How did I get moderated "Redundant" when I posted my comment first?</rant>

Re:Open To Closed

[Lunastorm]

Hitler didn't back down when he believed something was "admirable." I guess he deserves some respect too. There's a difference between being strong-willed and being a psychotic megalomaniac.

Trailer movie?

[RovingSlug]

Take a look at the screenshots and trailer movie.

I couldn't find the link to the trailer movie... can someone point the way?

Re:Trailer movie?

[ankit]

I have scanned almost the whole site a couple of times.. No sign of any trailer movie :(

Re:Trailer movie?

[Darkvenom]

Who wants a trailer movie? The graphics suck...

Re:Trailer movie?

[Nailer]

Indeed, they seem to have taken it down. It was made a while ago and is in DivX format, and about 7 MB.

I have it - if you have the bandwidth to host it I'll mail it to you.

Mike

Re:Trailer movie?

[I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I]

Got the bandwith. Plz. mail me.

jirnberg at fh-sbg.ac.at

Re:Trailer movie?

[hkmwbz]

No chance of making it available online somewhere (web/ftp)? I'd be happy to mirror it for you, for as long as my bandwidth can handle it :)

Re:Trailer movie?

[redcliffe]

Just put it on Gnutella. Tell everyone what the filename is and they can search for it.

Great

[dreamchaser]

I've been following the development of this, and it's nice to see a game being developed simultaneously for Linux and Windows, rather than being released on Linux a year or more after the Windows counterpart.

I also like the fact that the binaries for all platforms will be on one CD. I'm tired of buying two copies of games if I want to run them on both Linux and Windoze.

Hopefully they will find a partner and be successful. It could be a good shot in the arm for Linux game development. It will be hard for them to say who is running it on what platform though, but I can live with that in return for getting all of the binaries in one box.

Re:Great

[Scoria]

This wouldn't be the first time that a game has been developed for Windows and Linux simultaneously.

However, I'm not sure we all appreciated the result much.

Re:Great

[Rhone]

I've been following the development of this, and it's nice to see a game being developed simultaneously for Linux and Windows, rather than being released on Linux a year or more after the Windows counterpart.

I would certainly hope that a game starring Tux, the Official Linux Penguin, and originally developed on Linux, would not be available for Windows before it's available for Linux.

I also like the fact that the binaries for all platforms will be on one CD. I'm tired of buying two copies of games if I want to run them on both Linux and Windoze.

Yes, it's certainly nice when the game is developed, and originally released, as cross-platform. (Like Terminus.) Unfortunately, that's not really an option when a separate company like Loki does the porting after the game has been released, and it's kind of unfair to blame Loki for that. If gaming under Linux is important to you, then send a message by not buying Windows-only games; that way, you'll certainly not pay for the same game twice.

Demo ???

[Tha_Zanthrax]

Where can I download the demo for version 1.0 ?? See tuxracer.com for earlier demos.

Re:Demo ???

[sacherjj]

I'm getting a lovely 2 frames per second on my Pentium III 500 with half a gig of RAM using Demo of 0.61 on Windows 2K. Hopefully that has improved.

Re:Demo ???

[Tha_Zanthrax]

Probably Win Y2K (it's always Bill's fault.)
Demo ran pretty sweet on PIII 733, 128 MB ram, Matrox G400 Dualhead (32Megs), Win98.

Re:Demo ???

[EvanTaylor]

Im getting pretty fluid graphics on a celery 800, with win2k, 256megs of ram, and a tnt2m64 32meg card.

Is it just me

[yatest5]

or does this look like a big load of shit that's only got on here cos it stars a penguin?

I'll get my coat ;-).

Re:Is it just me

[rm-r]

I have to agree, it's just joe racing game and there's plenty of those around already. It's not as if this is the first game to come out on Linux either (although granted they do normally take a few months after the windows release)

Will I get mod'ed down as well for having my own opinion?

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, IMHO this game served a very important purpose for me. It showed me that my XFree86 4.x Nvidia driver was working properly with 3D. It runs very smooth and fast with the new driver and it runs like crap with the generic one and software based 3D under XFree86 3.3.6. Other than that, I didn't think there was any purpose to Tuxracer. I don't think I'd pay money for it though. I wish Linux had a good helicopter or car racing or even football/baseball/basketball game for it, etc. As it is I think I'll just continue using my Linux box for serious work and my playstation and windows for games. :-/

Re:Is it just me

[FortKnox]

You are mighty brave to say this openly, and I completely agree with you.

When it comes to games, the only ones published here are the highly anticipated geek games (CivIII, Black&White, etc...). Tux racer has none of these, cept a penguin.

MAYBE if it was linux only, I can see it, but, quite frankly, its a racing game. Not many nerds get into racing. And another thing is that its been done SO MANY TIMES.

Lets just leave it as MarioCart being the champion "cartoon" racing game, and try for something new, shall we?

Yeah, I'm your average slashdot whiner, but they post stuff that would obviously be complained about!

Next article will be "Microsoft is bad, linux is good"... just wait and see.

FYI - Its best to whine when you have 50 karma, so after you get modded down some, you can work your way back. I call it the "Slashdot Game".

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

You should play it. It's great fun - at least the versions I played were (the free ones) so i guess 1.0 will be even cooler. It certainly does look like it will deliver.

Re:Is it just me

[MSBob]

I'll get my coat ;-).

/. getting infested by hordes c.s.s. lurkers? What's the world coming to?

Re:Is it just me

[yatest5]

Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Funny=1, Underrated=1, Total=5.

Bloody hell - I've started a right discussion on here ;-). Go guys!!

Re:Is it just me

[yatest5]

FYI - Its best to whine when you have 50 karma, so after you get modded down some, you can work your way back. I call it the "Slashdot Game".


Yeah - brilliant innit? I've managed to pick up some notright who gives me grief each time I post because I disagreed with groupthink at some point. Fantastic that not only are the linux freaks who live under the rocks on this site losers in real life, but they are on here too!!! Mod away MF's - another 18 points to lose :).

Re:Is it just me

[yatest5]

And if you want a laugh at how predictable these gimps are - check out my ironic post here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24190&cid=2618 970 which actually got marked 'insightful' by some idiot. Superb :).

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Not many nerds get into racing.

Pfft. Not. This nerd bought a PS/2 only to play GT3A. Also, here is my daily ride. Best $40G's I ever spent! ;)

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's my daily ride. Best $180G's I ever spent :-P

Re:Is it just me

[kfg]

You're just going through what I went through with a post I wrote when Tux Racer announced it was going commercial.

And as I noted a few days ago I've always been proudest of my posts that start a moderator war.It lets me know I might actually have said something important.

As per my previous post I put it a bit more, um, diplomatically, than you did, but the basic idea was the same.

I still wonder just who the *developers* believe is the intended market for this game? The Windows masses looking for yet *another* cheesy, console style racing game, only this one with a cute Linux Penguin theme? The OSS crowd, at least many of whom won't buy it because of its turning its back on its OSS roots, and who seem to have an inexhaustable fondness for FPS's?

The developers seem to be handling their own marketing and distribution at this point. Now, I'll be the first in line to poke fun at the idiotic marketing droids, but I think the developers might have been well abvised to have at least had a little *chat* with a decent marketer before taking the commercial plunge.

In my original post on this subject this point in the argument is where someone stepped in to yell, " Hey, they deserve to get payed."

Well, yes, if you are *hired* by a company to write software I assume you are going to demand financial recompense for you time and skills.

However, if you write software and release it to the public you do NOT have any "right" to much of anything. You have the RISK of being in business. You have *invested* your time and captial in a venture. You now have to *entice* me, the buyer, into exchanging MY money for YOUR product.

Now, if the game is any good it will engender a mod maker crew around the already existing OSS base. Just as such crews grow up around the best flight sims, racing sims and FPS's. This will be comparitively easy and painless given that we have the complete v0.6 code to work from.

So how do the developers sell the game?

If such a crew does NOT grow up around the game it will be because the game really isn't all that good and/or noone cares about it to that extent,

So how do the developers sell the game?

There is, as yet, no publisher, and thus the only people who have even heard of it are OSS people. If you build a better mousetrap, who cares? The MS masses being ignorant of the game arn't going to even be able to buy it.

So how do the developers sell the game?

What the hell is their business plan, other than:

1. We deserve to be paid
2. Go commercial
3. Profit!

Step two is at least a bit more sophisticated than 2. ?, but not much.

Historically there has really only been ONE model of commercial selfdistribution of independantly produced games that works. The Apogee model.

Give away feature complete, latest version copies that are *game incomplete.* If people get hooked on the game in the first 6 levels they'll buy the rest. If they don't, well, guess what Charlie, you've just writeen a lousy game. No way around that pardner. The audience for games is ALWAYS right. Go directly to new development project. Do NOT pass the publishers. Do not collect any profits. In fact, lose all your money and start over. That's the commercial world.

With head to head multiplayer they MIGHT have something here, and if were marketing this game I rather think I'd give away the first 6 levels of v1.0, feature complete, inculding multiplayer.

Then I'd set up a competition website similar to what Sierra does for N4. You want to compete and progress past the first 6 rounds? THEN you have to buy the commercial version.

If the game is *good* enough people will buy it.

If it isn't, the developers don't "deserve" to get payed squat.

KFG

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

You spent 40 billion dollars on a butt-ugly car?

Re:Is it just me

[steveha]

Yeah, it is just you.

I really love TuxRacer. I'm sure there are other racing games out there that are equally fun, but that takes nothing away from TuxRacer.

TuxRacer is easily played with just a keyboard; it runs smoothly and looks pretty; some of the courses are really well-designed; in short, it is nice in many ways. The only shortcoming, to me, is that there aren't enough courses, there is only 1 song, and only 1 player model... and the 1.0 release will provide more courses, music, and models.

There are times when I am in the mood for a short, fun game, a sort of snack of a game, and TuxRacer hits the spot. Unless they have changed the fundamental nature of TuxRacer somehow, I'll be paying for 1.0.

steveha

Re:Is it just me

[perky]

yes. just downloaded. played for about 20 minutes. about to delete. It's tedious, but pretty. BTW, appreciate you sticking your neck out on this forum.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not just you. Tuxracer is, well, not very fun. The graphics and music are nothing to really speak of either.

Slap my ass and call me snotty!!

[The WIPO Troll]

THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ
By The WIPO Troll, $Revision: 1.11 $

Why have I been receiving emails from CmdrTaco, in which he seems to be speaking in some kind of code language?

Whenever Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda gets bored (and who wouldn't, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the Slashdot database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy engaging in homosexual orgies with him. How he determines this is anyone's guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, or a nick with the letter P in it, you're in trouble.

So this time, he found you. Lucky you.

CmdrTaco's code language is relatively easy to decipher. He prefers to speak in thinly-veiled sexual innuendo to evade the watchful (but relatively stupid) eye of Slashdot's parent corporation, VA Software. CmdrTaco's "Commander" is, of course, his penis -- a small, withered little thing that lives in his pants that only comes out in the presence of other men or at the beck and call of CmdrTaco's own right hand. His "Taco bells" are the shriveled testes that droop beneath his Commander, and his "Taco sauce" is his, well, jizz. It should be more than obvious to you now what he means when he asks you to "ring his Taco bells" or "taste his gourmet Taco sauce."

Lastly, there is a practice he refers to as "Taco-snotting" and the more shocking "circle-snot."

Good Lord. What is "Taco-snotting?"

"Taco-snotting" is the term used by CmdrTaco to refer to the practice of sucking the penis of a homosexual man (or unwilling heterosexual; CmdrTaco is rumored to prefer rape), then blowing the semen out his nose onto his partner's (victim's) face and body. A long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTaco's face, dribbling out of his nose and down his cheek: hence the term, "Taco-snotting."

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Ewwwwww. So, can I stop receiving these emails?

Hopefully.

You most likely forgot to uncheck the "Willing to Taco-snot" checkbox in your account preferences. CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad, and he's probably already been lurking outside your bathroom window for weeks with a camera, some tissues and lube. There's no escaping a geek in heat, so it's probably too late for you, but you can possibly rectify this situation. To remove yourself from CmdrTaco's sights, log into your Slashdot account, go to your user page, click on Messages, and uncheck the box next to "Willing to Taco-snot." Maybe he'll ignore you. Probably not.

I can't stop receiving these emails from CmdrTaco!?

If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, he might leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, restraining orders, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object capable of warding off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. Trust me, when they charge... oh, the humanity. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot you, you will most likely end up tied up in his basement to be used as his sex slave for the rest of your life (or until he accidentally drowns you in spunk in a circle-snot).

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Unfortunately, yes. I first met CmdrTaco at an Open Source Convention. He invited me back to his room for a game of Quake and some "gourmet Tacos," but when I got there, he jumped me and tied me to his bed, stripping me. After taking his "Commander" out of his pants, Mr. Taco made me suck the withered thing six times. He then performed his vile Taco-snotting ritual on me three times over the next two hours, bringing me to orgasm after sweaty, mind-numbing orgasm... then he snotted my own milky-white jizz back onto my face, into my mouth, then again on my exposed belly.

CmdrTaco invited several of his Open Source (or rather, "Open Sauce" -- man sauce) buddies over to continue the twisted snotfest. Linux Torvalds raped my ass with his "monolithic kernel," and Anal Cox used his "network stack" in a multitude of unspeakable ways on and in every orifice in my defenseless body. Michael was there in his leather Nazi uniform, caning my ass with a bamboo pole and ranting about "all those Censorware freaks out to get him."

How did you finally escape, you ask? After about 16 hours of countless homosexual atrocities perpetrated against my restrained body, they all finally went to sleep on top of me, sweat-soaked and exhausted. I was left there, covered in bubbly, translucent jizz-snot, chained to the bed, with half a dozen fat, pasty-white fags lying around and on top of me. Fortunately the spooge coating my flesh worked wonderfully as a lubricant; I was able to squirm my way out of the handcuffs and slip out the back door. I'm just glad I survived the ordeal. These geeks had a lot of built-up spunk in their wads -- I could've easily been drowned!

That's horrible. Does "Taco-snotting" have anything to do with CmdrTaco's "special taco"?

No, that's a different disgusting perversion CmdrTaco indulges himself in. CmdrTaco is usually not satisfied with merely snotting your own jizz back onto your face, he most often enjoys involving his own bodily fluids in his twisted games. WeatherTroll has spent some time trying to educate the Slashdot readership about this vile practice (emphasis added):

You may be wondering what CmdrTaco's "special taco" is. You will be wishing that you hadn't been wondering after you finish reading this post. To make his "special taco", CmdrTaco takes a taco shell and shits on it. He then adds lettuce, jacks off on the taco, and adds a compound to make the person who eats the taco unconscious. Of course, the compound does not make the person unconscious until the taco is fully eaten. Thus CmdrTaco force-feeds the taco to the unsuspecting victim.

After the victim is unconscious, he is held against his will and used for CmdrTaco's nefarious sexual purposes. This includes shoving taco shells up the victim's ass, Taco-snotting, and getting Jon Katz involved.

Completely different, yet no less revolting. It should be clear to you now that CmdrTaco is a very, very sick individual, as are most of the Slashdot editors.

Does Jon Katz get involved in any of this? I thought he was a paedophile, not a homosexual.

Actually, Jon Katz is a homosexual paedophile. He's also a coprophiliac, and, many suspect, a zoophile. Jon Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesn't involve himself in circle-snots. Mr. Katz usually engages in a game called " Katz juicy-douching" with his harem of little-boy slaves: a vile practice which involves administering an enema to himself of the little boy's urine (forced out of them with a pair of pliers), spooging the vile muck from his ass back into the enema bag, then squirting and slathering the goo all over himself, and the little boy's chained-up and naked bodies. If he's in the mood, he will sometimes skip refilling the enema bag and just squirt it from his ass onto his boys. Unwilling boys are further tortured with the pliers until they comply and allow Mr. Katz to juicy-douche them for the rest of their lives.

As I already said, Mr. Katz is also a zoophile. As if the sexual escapades with the helpless little boys aren't enough, Jon usually enjoys his juicy-douches best when his penis is firmly planted in a female goat's anus. He is also rumoured to get off on watching his little boys eat the goat's small, bean-like turds.

...Are you getting hard writing this?

Why, yes. :) Join me in a WIPO-snot?

No, thanks. I'm already CmdrTaco's boi toi.

________________________________________
READER COMMENTS

1. Re:The Taco-Snotting FAQ Rides Again!! (Updated so (Score:0)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.25 9:14 (#2609574)
   
   try to find a pic of actual "taco-snotting"! fucking funny it would be! so go to gay porn sites day in and day out until you find a man giving another man a blowjob that has jizz coming out of his nose and mouth. by the way, keep up the good work

2. Re:Snotting another first!! (Score:0)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.23 12:18 (#2603370)
   
   WIPO, this is getting waaaay old, either drop it or revise it.... there've been no updates for days now...
   
   CmdrTaco

3. Re:It's Taco SPAM!!! (Score:0)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.22 17:28 (#2600815)
   
   A truly excellent and very humourous troll indeed!
   However...
   
   To complete this perverted orgy, fellow geeks Michael, Timothy, and Jamie often join in, dressed in black Gestapo uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves.
   
   Black GeStaPo uniforms? The GeStaPo (Geheime Staatspolizei - Secret State Police) wore civilian clothes (although there are reports on them occasionally using Allgemeine SS uniforms in occupied territories).
   
   I seriously doubt that perverted individuals like CmdrTaco et al would have the good taste to ever wear the outstandingly beautiful black Waffen SS uniforms! Please update the FAQ accordingly.
   • Re:It's Taco SPAM!!! (Score:0)
     by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.23 4:06 (#2602610)
     
     Actually, it appears you are both wrong!! Ah ha!! I think our boy WIPO was thinking of the Allgemeine SS uniforms. Waffen SS were grey.

4. Re:Microsoft's Taco-Snotting Connection (Score:-1, Troll)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.21 4:49 (#2594325)
   
   oh yeah, you say you have masturbated only 2 times to this post. well, by the time it takes for me to get through reading it, i usually end up masturbated 5 to 6 times, 10 to 12 if i have the goatse.cx homepage loaded up and am looking at it side by side with the slashdot page. my keyboard, hands, mouse, monitor, the underside of my desk and around the floor under my desk are cum soaked and sticky with the man smell i know and love.

5. Re:Microsoft's Taco-Snotting Connection (Score:0)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.21 4:41 (#2594311)
   
   for version 2 you should make a total re-write of the cod...errr...text and add some details about cmdrtaco and the homo-gang's happenings with their coworkers (osdn?) and all of the gay revelry they enjoy and promote. by the way, did i just see cmdrtaco on television promoting the nax hair removal system? i guess after using vaseline in and around his ass he grew quite a ponytail and it had to be removed somehow...ouch!

6. Re:Microsoft's Taco-Snotting Connection (Score:-1, Troll)
   by TRoLLaXoR on 2001.11.21 3:59 (#2594191)
   
   WIPO, do you notice how few comments you get for anything you write/post/spam nowadays?
   
   -Trollaxor

7. Jon-Katz docking (Score:-1)
   by sales_worldwide on 2001.11.20 11:53 (#2588488)
   
   You forgot to mention Jon Katz's "docking" games, where he places his chopper head to head with another chap, and rolls the other guys foreskin over his own circumcised end ("docking"), providing him with fantasies of actually having his own forskin ...
   "Making linux GPL was the best thing I ever did" - Torvalds. I'd hate to see the worst thing...

8. Re:Snotting a first! (Score:-1)
   by Fucky the troll on 2001.11.20 11:28 (#2588446)
   
   Woah! When did the WIPO troll get freed? And how the fuck did I miss it?
   
   Excellent FP, sir.
   
   This is a sig virus. Please put me in your sig

9. Re:Snotting a first! (Score:-1, Troll)
   by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.20 11:04 (#2588407)
   
   omg that is crapflooding material if i ever saw it!!!!!! and u got a first post!!!! whoot to the wipo troll!!!

10. GW, please.... (Score:0)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.19 9:03 (#2583756)
    
    GW...you know we love every hair on your 27 acre ass... and I, for one, would never do anything untowards your graceful demeanor. And you probably have several friends that would love to help you do the bear dance all over my face if I so much as spelled your name wrong. And you know I'd defend your Constitutional right to defame God in heaven. I'd even help fund your education, should you ever decide to take that route. Hell, I'd buy you a tall tepid bear-whiz beer if you were here with me, right now!
    
    But. ...if you can't find another topic, I'm gonna step over your dead mother's grave and kick your assuredly anesthetitized butt clear across the playground.
    
    Now go stick your shaved head back down inside the woman's toilet, and just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll jump in the tow-truck and drive right over to help you pull it right out...ok?
    
    thanks

11. Re:Help me Taco-Snotters!! (Score:-1)
    by mark knopfler 69 on 2001.11.19 8:25 (#2583695)
    
    I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU SIR. FOR ONE THING, THE E-MAIL FROM CMDRTACO DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH GRAMMATICAL AND SPELLING MISTAKES. Let's be realistic here, CmdrTaco usually types with one hand, and since he is shaking from jacking off his aim on the keyboard isn't too good. Those e-mails were a little too well written. Sorry boy, you'll have to do better.

12. Re: What the hell is "taco snotting"? (Score:-1)
    by WeatherTroll on 2001.11.19 8:14 (#2583667)
    
    You should update this to say VA Software instead of VA Linux.

13. YOU ARE WINNER (Score:1)
    by smackmonkey on 2001.11.19 7:06 (#2583510)
    
    Crackhead moderators: this is +5, Hilarious material.
    
    --
    CNN declares War on Islam!
    Left-wing America declares War on its Civil Liberties!

14. Re:On Taco-Snotting 1.9 (Score:0)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.19 5:40 (#2583336)
    
    This was funny the first 100 times. Now it is getting boring!

15. Digusting and Shameful (Score:-1)
    by egg troll on 2001.11.18 22:27 (#2582054)
    
    Having masturbated *twice* to this post, I'm still incredibly aroused! Come over for a Taco Snot. I'll be wearing my crotchless Clifford the Big Red Dog outfit!!
    
    For more info check out this /. article

16. IMPROVE THE FAQ (Score:-1, Flamebait)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.18 12:03 (#2580822)
    
    add more links to goatse and to cowboineal's site to make it better. a link to rotten.com would be nice too
    • Re:IMPROVE THE FAQ (Score:0)
      by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.18 12:18 (#2580832)
      
      and a link to michael's site and to jon katz's site if he has one and homo's site. i dont know what else to say. maybe a few links to phallic.org they have nice penis pictures! a link to the planet quake site or whatever. really make the reader feel this faq really answers their questions. oh yeah, and when you talk about cmdrtaco snotting you, say he brought you to "orgasm after sweaty orgasm". describe it more is all i'm saying. and use more italics and bolding! and when you talk about jon katz shitting or whatever have a link to fecal japan on rotten.com
      
      other wise a great job wipo troll! keep up the good work!

17. Re:CmdrTaco's filthy secret! (Score:-1)
    by Wil Wheaton on 2001.11.18 6:41 (#2580438)
    
    Hi. Let's be buddies.. butt buddies.
    --
    WIL WHEATON DOT NET

18. WIPO speaks the truth (Score:-1)
    by dead_puppy on 2001.11.18 5:33 (#2580342)
    
    Here is an e-mail I received a week ago:
    
    From: malda@slashdot.org
    To: puppy_dead@hotmail.com
    Subject: were where you last friday? :(
    
    I thought we where supposed to meet at Backdoor's at 8-ish, sugar-lips? You could've at least told me that you could'nt make it! I was even in my favorite pink skirt for you, honey-cup... next time, you could be more considarite and tell me you cant come... bastard.
    
    --
    CmdrTaco (malda@slashdot.org)
    
    You finding Ling-Ling's head?

19. Taco snotting is WRONG!!! (Score:-1)
    by Big_Ass_Spork on 2001.11.18 4:53 (#2580300)
    
    I do it wrong
    
    Laying here in the shadows of my room, I squint up at my love. My Ms. Portman. I am sore and tired after fucking her for eight solid hours. My chapped and aching dick is soaking in grits to relieve the pain. She gets on her knees and starts lapping the grits up out of the bowl. She places her beautiful hands on my penis and starts to lick the grits off my achy piece.
    
    Massaging my nutsack she....
    
    WAIT, I DO IT WRONG!!!!
    
    Yanking my dick out of her mouth I throw her to the ground and shove it in to her gaping freshly fisted ass. [goatse.cx]
    
    "OH BIG ASS SPORK!! Fuck my ass, fuck my ass good. DEEPER, my stallion, deeper!! Make a Beowulf cluster of sperm on my back!!"
    
    "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this baby!"
    
    I DO IT WRONG!!!!
    
    ---
    All your Sporks are belong to Big_Ass_Spork! What you say?! All your Sporks are belo... forget it...

20. Rob Malda Dead at age 25! (Score:-1)
    by j0nkatz on 2001.11.17 22:54 (#2579596)
    
    I just heard some sad news on the radio -- famous queerbait Rob Malda was found dead in his Holland home this morning. The details were a bit hazy, but it seems that he drowned in jizz while Taco Snotting his friend Hemos. I'm sure everyone in the /. community will miss him -- even if you didn't enjoy his queer antics and boring ass website, there's no denying his contributions to the homosesual cultural development, particularly in the areas of Taco snotting. Truly an American icon.
    
    I wanna Open Source sex so it won't be worth a shit either.

21. TACO-SNOTTING is really Donkey-Punching (Score:-1, Troll)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.15 6:38 (#2567601)
    
    No no no, the correct term for that is "donkey-punch". I have eye-witnessed this amazing eye-popping event demonstrated on unsuspecting hose-monsters by my frat brothers in the past.. . :-)

22. Re:the effect of knowlege laws... (Score:1)
    by AbsoluteRelativity on 2001.11.15 5:31 (#2567457)
    
    The WIPO Troll
    Slashdot and the Karma Lottery - News for uber monkeys, by uber monkeys.

23. Re:Taco-Snotting (Score:-1, Troll)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.13 9:27 (#2557632)
    
    Oh, man that's just sick !

24. HOW DO I GET AN ANONYMOUS PROXY? (Score:-1, Troll)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.13 9:03 (#2557604)
    
    TELL ME WHERE I CAN GET AN ANONYMOUS proxy please WIPO Troll. Maybe later i will join you in a snotting at my place. ;P

25. Re:Taco-Snottage!?!?!? (Score:-1, Offtopic)
    by vikool on 2001.11.13 7:43 (#2557495)
    
    what is this bull shit,i feel offened that some people feel so so senseless to post stuff like these esp when such a tragic incident has occured

26. Re:Taco-felching!! (Score:-1)
    by I.T.R.A.R.K. on 2001.11.11 22:38 (#2551890)
    
    Where the fuck do I sign up?!
    
    - I throw rocks at retarded kids
    
    "Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."

27. Re:Taco-felching!! (Score:-1, Troll)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.11 21:53 (#2551753)
    
    this shit is hilarious..keep up the good work.

28. Re:Taco-felching!! (Score:-1, Offtopic)
    by rockwood on 2001.11.11 21:49 (#2551746)
    
    OMG! That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard! WHo in their right mind would sit down and waste the time to construct such a replusive story. I guess I'll be skipping lunch and dinner today.. and possibly tomorrow also. The game doesn't affect reality. Reality affects the game.

29. Re:Ban this! It's disgusting!! (Score:0)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.11 14:43 (#2550701)
    
    dude, this is crap-flood material if i ever saw it.
    duuuuuuuuudddddddddddddeeeeeeeee.

30. Re:Taco-Snotting = HATE SPEECH (Score:-1, Flamebait)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.11 8:16 (#2550266)
    
    horny_rob_6969@hotmail.com
    
    Ah, so that's what the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.horny-rob newsgroup is about!

31. MOD THIS UP PLEASE!!! (Score:-1)
    by egg troll on 2001.11.11 5:34 (#2550024)
    
    +5, Arousing
    
    For more info check out this /. article

32. Re:Taco-Snotting = HATE SPEECH (Score:-1, Offtopic)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.11 4:39 (#2549891)
    
    WINNER>

33. Re:Taco-Snotting = HATE SPEECH (Score:-1, Offtopic)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.11 4:37 (#2549887)
    
    I love you. Why do you use your bitchslapped account, rather than signing up for a new account to post at +1 before getting bitchslapped by the censors here? I guess I should speak for myself, but I don't want to log out and lose all my slashdot customization properties, nor do I want to lose my 50 karma yet.

34. Re:On Taco-Snotting (Score:0)
    by Anonymous Coward on 2001.11.09 9:19 (#2542412)
    
    you fucking rock! right down to the expanded cvs id!
    
    WIPO trolls > linux

________________________________________

• The URL of this document is http://slashdot.org/journal.pl? op=display &uid=267426 &id=2346.
• Previous revisions are maintained at http://slashdot.org/journal.pl? op=display &uid=308209.

$Id: tacosnotting.html,v 1.11 2001/11/25 15:40:22 wipo Exp $

Who owns Tux?

[pr0nbot]

Just out of interest - who has intellectual property rights over the Tux character?

Re:Who owns Tux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Ewing does.

Re:Who owns Tux?

[Novus]

Apparently, Larry Ewing did the original Tux pictures. He asks that you acknowledge him and the GIMP when using his images (if someone asks).

Nice to see the correct spelling of 'arse'

[popeydotcom]

Well done slashdot / Nailer / Timothy.

why...

[Antity-H]

is the penguin so slooowww! only 73km/h as maximum speed (at least on the screenshot) if not fun enough, i hope they will have introduced a bonus to boost it up to 300km/h :)

Re:why...

[abe ferlman]

Yeah, I mean the star wars racer game lets you go over 800mph, and that came out over a year ago! Maybe I just need to overclock my processor...

:)

'Real Work'

[EnglishTim]

The 'real work' in a game is pretty much split 50/50 between programming and things like artwork, level design etc. I'm sure there are exceptions (Final Fantasy could be one), but that's been pretty much the way it is on the games I've worked on.

This is one of the reasons I can't agree with RMS. Why is it that someone who creates some music, a level design, some textures or a model deserves compensation for their hard work, but somehow someone who spends just as much energy writing code does not?

Re:'Real Work'

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't. Artwork and music should be free too. In fact, all intellectual property should be free. Artists could make up for it by painting cathedral ceilings or doing portraits of rich Italian bankers. Musicians can make their money by selling t-shirts and doing concerts.

Anyway, Open Source is a fun concept as long as people don't push it to the extreme. If someone wants to do an open source project because they love it and it's a hobby and they want to share their work, more power to them. Demanding that all software be open source and that people should someone try to make money by selling support for it (and competing with 20 other companies selling support for your product too if it's good enough) is just plain whiney on our part. People deserve to make an honest day's wage.

Personally I don't think I'd buy Tuxracer as it got boring after about 5 minutes of playing the different levels, but it might be fun for a child.

Re:'Real Work'

[MartinG]

You seem to have directly equated "compensation for their hard work" with "financial compensation for their hard work." That is a very broad and incorrect assumption to make.

The "compensation" I get when I write code is not primarily finincial, because I do it for the love of it, not just to make money. Similarly some of my friends write music for the same reasons. I can't say I have friends who do graphical artwork, but I imagine there are people who do it for fun.

Maybe the question you should ask is:

If there are coders who work very well for the love of it and produce excellent code, and they do not demand money for their efforts, then what gives musicians the right to make similar demands?

Re:'Real Work'

[hey!]

I dunno. If there were no IP, would programmers still work? I think so.

No license fees, but you could still be paid to make things happen. My own small company makes about even amounts from license fees and custom work. If we had no license fees we'd probably have more user and more custom work. Things would be tighter, some non-programmers would lose their jobs, and we would have less time to do some of the more researchy things, but the programmers would survive.

For larger companies, the situation would be mixed. IBM would do fine, Microsoft not so good, companies like Oracle would probably survive but look much different.

Re:'Real Work'

[Anonymous Coward]

As in the story where everyone depends on calculators and doing math by hand is revolutionary

And why don't I get compensated for many hours of painstaking work in building a sandcastle on the beach where everyone can look at it without paying for it?

If you want to get compensated for work, then do work whose end result cannot be infinitely copied at no cost. I'm sick and tired of all these coders complaining that programmers don't get compensated. Learn some new skills and get a job that produces an end result that you can charge properly for (like building a house or something).

Re:'Real Work'

[EnglishTim]

Obviously there are many people who code/make music/create art who do not ask to be compensated. Fair enough! that's their choice. But there are many who, although they still enjoy practising their art/skill, wish to be financially compensated for their work. Any time/work *is* worth money. To claim otherwise would be to reduce everything to the bare cost of the materials involved, which would not allow anybody to make a living from anything but farming and mining.

When you pay for software (and this applies to music and art as well...), you are effectively paying for a service - the service of someone writing the code instead of you having to do it. As a result of many people paying for it, you don't have to shoulder the entire cost of that development by yourself.

Re:'Real Work'

[Anonymous Coward]

we live in a society. one that should protect works that enrich it. understand that concept. please. when reading something, then think if its better that the author is supported by society or not. when using some program, then think if it is better if the programmer is supported by society or not. we dont live in anarchy for a reason. we dont do everything we can do for a reason. understand this.

Re:'Real Work'

[Ed Avis]

It would be nice to download the engine as free software from Sourceforge, together with a minimal set of graphics and levels. Then pay real money for the full game data (sprites, sound effects, levels and so on). This is more or less what happens with Doom, I think.

Re:'Real Work'

[MikeFM]

I believe the argument is that code is like law in that it sets the rules by which the world runs and in order to maintain our freedom over these rules they must be available for all to see and know and make changes to. I could be wrong.. feel free to correct my impression.

As a programmer and artist I don't mind giving away ALL my work and I don't really see a line between science and art. Very few people make a very good living off either and they are usually both appreciated most long after they are dead.

I was sort of disappointed to see them close some of the source. I really hope they open it back up after they've earned back the money they invested. We all deserve to pay our bills if we are willing to work but it doesn't hurt to give as much as we can to the public good. Sure a game isn't life or death but even entertainment can do people good.

Anyway it looks great and I'll buy a copy. I'd buy a copy regardless of license if I like it.. especially if it comes with some fun extras like manuals, pretty cd's, posters, stickers, etc. Hope to see some more games from this company. :)

Re:'Real Work'

[stud9920]

I don't really see a line between science and art

According to Donald Knuth, Art cannot be taught to a computer. Science can.

Re:'Real Work'

[Hobbex]

No, you are the one that needs to understand. The basis of our society is not compensating anybody, it is individual freedom. That is the concept that you need to understand. That is the freedom for people to communicate without being told what they can and cannot send, that is the freedom to have a library, in a book shelf or on your harddisk, and not be told that some of the information is illegal and must be burned, and that is freedom to use the computer that modern life depends upon without being forced into using software that is written to control rather than to aid you.

You are the one that needs to start asking yourself. Think if it is better in a world where you can talk to your friends without every bit of information being scanned to see if it was illegal for you communicate that idea. Then think if it is better for you to tell your computer what to do, or for you're computer to tell you what you can and cannot do on behalf of government and bussiness cartels. Think whether you care more about your integrity as an individual and the promise of free communication, or some lousy economic argument advocated loudest unsurprisingly by those who are rich and stand to get richer.

We have freedom for a reason, and we do not tear it down for unsupported unnecessary utilitarianism. UNDERSTAND THIS.

Re:'Real Work'

[Sloppy]

This is one of the reasons I can't agree with RMS. Why is it that someone who creates some music, a level design, some textures or a model deserves compensation for their hard work, but somehow someone who spends just as much energy writing code does not?

There is nothing in RMS' stated platform that I know of, where he makes such an unfair distinction.

You're getting confused between someone being compensated for their work, and someone having exclusive control over something they have created and released to the public. You can have the first without the second. But it requires that you sell your labor (i.e. get paid by the hour) rather than sell a product (i.e. get paid per unit sold). In many industries, labor and units scale at the same rate (and also there is a material cost that scales at the same rate), so this distinction wasn't noticed. For example, it takes about twice as long to sew twenty shirts as it takes to sew ten. When you get to easily-duplicated intangibles such as software or digital art, where there is no significant material cost and unit production does not scale at the same rate as labor, the distinction between labor and units becomes very large.

The traditional business models for proprietary software, entertainment media, etc is to pretend that the distinction does not exist. But GPL-commies ;-) take that distinction into account, and want compensation for software to be proportional to its production cost, as is the case with most industries.

Re:'Real Work'

[uchian]

I agree. More to the point, if you want to be paid for writing something, or making something, then obviously - don't make it until people have paid you to.

Imagine if plumbers came into your house, refitted your boiler, checked your pipes, etc. without asking you first. And then tried to charge you afterwards when you start using the new stuff that they have done.

And remember, this problem would be a lot more widespread if we could manage teleportation and duplication of real-life objects - Imagine if you could go down the street and make a copy of your mates Ferrari :-)

Re:'Real Work'

[Chazbot 2002]

This is a completely bogus argument, the distinction does not exist.

Every product I can think of has some element of the economics of software. Music, movies, etc are obvious corrolaries, but you don't think the car you bought has operates under the same model? Almost half of what you pay for a car has NOTHING to do with production cost. Software development, R&D, design, focus groups, consulting services; you're paying for all of these things when you buy that car, and NONE of them scale linearly with production. Should that be free too? Do you think GM owes you 50% off for the part of the car that's not derived from manual labor or raw steel?

Re:'Real Work'

[praxim]

I'm killing my karma here, but someone needs to say it...

If I create something that people are willing to pay for, no one, certainly no pompous ass on slashdot or UNIX-bearded Bulgarian-dancing hacker has the right to insist that I have to find another way to make a living. You can't tell me that t-shirts are worth more money than quality music. (I don't listen to Radiohead because their t-shirts kick ass.)

Re:'Real Work'

[Anthony Boyd]

Artists could make up for it by painting cathedral ceilings or doing portraits of rich Italian bankers. Musicians can make their money by selling t-shirts and doing concerts.

You are at this point telling people how they will earn money under your system. That is antithetical to the entire concept of freedom.

Re:'Real Work'

[EnglishTim]

I do understand freedom. However, absolute freedom is also known as 'anarchy'. We trade the freedom to shoot someone for the security of knowing that if someone tries to shoot us they will be punished, and hopefully prevented from doing the same thing again. We trade the freedom to drive as fast as we damn well please on any side of the road for the security of knowing that we can drive in (relative) safety. We trade the freedom to claim anything we like about anybody else for the security of knowing that we can take those that spread lies about us to court to prevent it from happening any more. And we trade the freedom to spread other people's work around as much as we like for the security of knowing that others will compensate us for the work that we have done.

Now, the line that you draw with all these things is down to personal (or rather governmental and cultural) taste, - here in the UK we have considerably stricter gun laws than in the US, but we are allowed to drive faster, and have sex and drink earlier, and burn any flag we damn well please.

"Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose"... To view copyright only from the consumer's point of view seems to me to be just as shortsighted as the seemingly prevailing view in the music industry, which is bringing in crippled CDs to stop people playing them on their computers, viewing things only from the producer's point of view.

Re:'Real Work'

[Sloppy]

Hmm... I think you got me. I'll think about this.

Re:'Real Work'

[Anonymous Coward]

I can love coding to death, but that alone won't pay my rent, feed me, or allow me to afford the equipment and software that lets me pursue my pasttime. I found I had a talent for coding when I was young and I decided to make it my profession, in the same way that someone who loves medicine can become a doctor and someone who loves writing music can become a professional musician. The argument that everything should be open-source _and_ free deprives me of the right to pursue what I love as a career.

The question I would like to ask is: "If there are coders who work very well for the love of it and produce excellent code, who choose to give it away for free, why should I lose my choice to request financial compensation for my work?" In a perfect world, I'd live and code for free. It just dosen't happen like that.

(as for the arguemnt that I should sell support, I say this: there are others who could provide more comprehensive support services than me - I'm a programmer, not necessarily a support technician).

Re:'Real Work'

[MikeFM]

I've never seen any science taught to a computer. A computer is a glorified calculator. It doesn't understand beauty and it doesn't understand the abstract connections the mind makes in science either. There is a process by which we 'prove' theories but the innovation involved is very non-linear.

Re:'Real Work'

[Anonymous Coward]

There is this homeless guy in the subway who plays really good guitar. Even he gets compensated. I'm sure he has about $10 in his hat by the end of the day.

I remember seeing a few in Boston Commons who play flutes and stuff too. I guess sleeping on a bench in the park is a tradeoff for doing it "for the love of it."

More Screenshots

[ankit]

More cool screenshots can be found at this link :

http://www.sunspirestudios.com/images/

Many of these are not linked from the site.

Re:More Screenshots

[Nailer]

More cool screenshots can be found at this link :

http://www.sunspirestudios.com/images/

Indeed - check out the new competitive team based mode, with voice commands and enemy taunts!

Re:More Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me, but isn't that a screenshot of Tribes 2?

This game will not succeed in the windows market

[wackysootroom]

I'm really not trying to troll here, but IMHO a game called "Tux Racer" will conjure up images of racing butlers. Without a more exciting name, people who don't know or care about "tux" the linux mascot will turn their noses up at this game.

Multiplayer team mode

[ankit]

This screenshot gives information on multiplayer team based gaming :

http://www.sunspirestudios.com/images/screenshot 00 001.png

Boris

[lastninja]

I sure hope Boris the polar bear (one of the playable charachters) drinks Open Cola and not coke.

They should have changed the name

[codexus]

TuxRacer started as an open-source game and as such it was right to use Tux. But as a commercial game I feel like little Tux has been betrayed.

Remember what Tux stands for. It's Tux not Mario or Sonic. He's a free animal and I want it to stay this way. I won't buy this game.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, your sentiment is nice, but they can do whatever they want with Tux. You can still get the source for the older version if you're so inclined.

from http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/

Feel free to do whatever you see fit with the images, you are encouraged to integrate them into other designs that fit your need. Comments suggestions are also welcome, so please tell me what you think of these. I suggest that you look at some of the other images available with integrated text.

...

Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks.

Furthermore, nobody has a trademark on Tux. As I said, the sentiment is nice, but it seems somewhat hypocritical for the same crowd that espouses "free everything" to complain when its mascot is used in a way it doesn't like. But then, the Slashdot audience has always been fickle like that. "Free Everything" even if it puts the content creators out of business. Splendid idea.

Re:They should have changed the name

[codexus]

I agree they've the right to do it, and that they should have the right. But just because you've the right to do something doesn't mean you should.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Marcus Brody]

Agreed. It does seem a little contradictary using the linux mascot in a closed source game. I had allways considered this game to be carrying the "linux banner" in the gaming world, but now it seems to carrying it in a different direction. Not that I am against closed source, but just doesnt seem right on this occasion.

Anyways, to be honest, Super Mario Kart will allways be the best cart racing game - man, how many hours did we wast at Uni on this game. Ahh... those were the days - tokin' through the night with winner stays on SMK.

So, forget tuxracer - download yourself a SNES emulator (there are plenty e.g http://www.snes9x.com/ ) and a SMK ROM & enjoy....

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's start the Free Tux campaing!

I'll bet someone has already bought www.freetux.org

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, the screenshot didn't impress me. At best they seem to be ripoffs from supreme snowboarding (sans the cool light-effects and general genX snowboard coolness)
which makes it pretty outdated. At worst it looks like a cheaply made freeware game.

Therefore i suggest

1) Sux Racer
2) Supreme cute ripoff boarding
3) Outdated downhill racer

Re:They should have changed the name

[Erasmus Darwin]

"It does seem a little contradictary using the linux mascot in a closed source game."

Well, they are releasing a Linux version. Besides, no one complains that xbill uses Bill Gates in an open source game, so turnabout is fair play.

Now if they were using the FSF's GNU mascot, on the other hand, I think you'd have more of a point.

Re:They should have changed the name

[sg_oneill]

I do wonder whether they have that right however on code that has been GPL contributed to by 3rd parties. Soliciting free labour on the terms that it's a community project and then shunting them out of the deal by closing the source doesnt sound fair, and I doubt it's necesarilly above board either. But hey! as they say ...IANAL

Re:They should have changed the name

[Tha_Zanthrax]

They should have changed the name to Bill Racer

Re:They should have changed the name

[Peale]

Does anyone else think that when they turn 18, and are no longer 'cute,' will go into pr0n?

Re:They should have changed the name

[FallLine]

While I'm not familiar with the particulars of TuxRacer's development, you can hardly say that the 3rd party developers were "shut out." Ok, maybe the company that owns the commercial version of TuxRacer copied the GPL code without the explicit consent of the 3rd party coders (although, from my understanding, there were VERY few of them...what's more it's possible that they simply excluded these patches from their code), however nothing has been taken from them. I fail to see how the Open Source community can claim that knowledge can be shared without dimming your own and then turn around and claim that some knowledge simply should not be shared, because you do not like the way it is used.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Marcus Brody]

Not sure your making sense man....
In xbill (a crappy game, if ever ther is one), Gates is the enemy. Therefore it is an anti-MS game, and could possibly be intepreted as a pro-OS game. I'm sure nobodys complained against this usage of Bill because it isnt worth it.... if they had used Bill Gates as an end-of-level bad guy in e.g Quake, it may have been a different matter. Alternatively, in tuxracer you play (by default) as the penguin. Therefore the penguin is "the hero" or "goodguy". Therefore, this could be considered a pro-linux - and by proxy - a pro OS game. I think this is a valid point.

Yes, it would be rather a travesty to have the GNU mascot as a character in their aswell..... if they did i might have to start a website campaign or tuxracer.die.die.die newsgroup or something /joke

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's saying that the code shouldn't be shared, but that its sharing should not be restricted. In other words, it's not the distribution that's being objected to, but the licensing.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

The assumption seems to be that the 'bazaar' has contributed considerable amounts of 3rd party code to every GPL project, thus ensuring free software. The reality (even for a popular game like Tux Racer) seems to be that volunteer coders aren't coming out of the woodwork in droves. Instead, you get things like donated art and levels.

Well, it would be interesting if some IT sociologist put ESR to the test and determined exactly how effective the cathedral and the bazaar models are at getting code from outside contributors. It could be (in the general case, ignoring Linux-Kernel) a big distinction over nothing.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Therefore, this could be considered a pro-linux - and by proxy - a pro OS game."

(As a quick aside, my comments were somewhat tongue-in-cheek -- especially the xbill one. However, I still think there's somewhat of a point to be made.)

I agree that Tux Racer, by using Tux as a mascot, is representing itself as pro-Linux. However, I believe that they fulfill that role (through the importance placed on the Linux version of the game). I do not believe that pro-Linux should automatically imply pro-OSS. One of the most obvious strengths of Windows is the existence of commercial third-party software. If I could walk into, say, CompUSA and see just as much Linux software as I do Windows software, that would be another tickmark on the short version of the Linux World Domination TODO list. Now in RMS's ideal world, all that commercial software would be open sourced, instead. While I appreciate some of the benefits of that ideal, I do feel it's too extreme. There's a benefit to being able to recoup software development costs from people other than your first customer, and the much touted "support model" of making money seems to be failing a lot of people. Still, Linux at its core is a good example of what OSS can do. However, that doesn't mean that anything and everything associated with it has to be exclusively OSS. This is especially relevent in the area of games, where OSS is way behind what the commercial folks have done. There are some very good OSS games (Nethack is probably my all-time favorite game), but for each of those, there's many more good commercial games. It's hard for a volunteer effort to compete with a team of programmers and artists working full-time for 2+ years.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Erasmus Darwin]

Oops. I'm an idiot and forgot to put the

tags between the paragraph breaks. Sorry about that. I previewed it, but my brain was on autopilot at the time.

Fixed version:

I agree that Tux Racer, by using Tux as a mascot, is representing itself as pro-Linux. However, I believe that they fulfill that role (through the importance placed on the Linux version of the game). I do not believe that pro-Linux should automatically imply pro-OSS.

One of the most obvious strengths of Windows is the existence of commercial third-party software. If I could walk into, say, CompUSA and see just as much Linux software as I do Windows software, that would be another tickmark on the short version of the Linux World Domination TODO list.

Now in RMS's ideal world, all that commercial software would be open sourced, instead. While I appreciate some of the benefits of that ideal, I do feel it's too extreme. There's a benefit to being able to recoup software development costs from people other than your first customer, and the much touted "support model" of making money seems to be failing a lot of people.

Still, Linux at its core is a good example of what OSS can do. However, that doesn't mean that anything and everything associated with it has to be exclusively OSS. This is especially relevent in the area of games, where OSS is way behind what the commercial folks have done. There are some very good OSS games (Nethack is probably my all-time favorite game), but for each of those, there's many more good commercial games. It's hard for a volunteer effort to compete with a team of programmers and artists working full-time for 2+ years.

Re:They should have changed the name

[dvdeug]

> the company that owns the commercial version of TuxRacer copied the GPL code without the explicit consent of the 3rd party coders

They didn't. They just didn't use that code or got permission.

> I fail to see how the Open Source community can claim that knowledge can be shared without dimming your own

I fail to see how the proprietary software community can claim that they should be able to use anything the open source community puts out, but we can't use anything of theirs. If the author didn't give you permission to copy it in that way, then you don't have permission, proprietary or open source.

Re:They should have changed the name

[FallLine]

They didn't. They just didn't use that code or got permission.

I didn't say they did. However, if you know, then why don't you know which particular method? Did they do both depending on the particular contributor?

I fail to see how the proprietary software community can claim that they should be able to use anything the open source community puts out, but we can't use anything of theirs. If the author didn't give you permission to copy it in that way, then you don't have permission, proprietary or open source.

I, and probably virtually everyone in the so-called "proprietary software community", have no problem with Open Source people dictating the terms of their license. After all, one should be entitled to the product of their own mind. Whether they want to keep it for themselves, share the source, dictate the license, charge for it, or whatever, that is up to the creator.

However, while they may have the right, it is hypocritical to claim that ideas cannot be property and can be shared without any cost to the creator and then turn around and say that there some be an exception in their own case. If it's truely FREE, in every sense in the word, then I should be ALLOWED to take the source and do whatever I want with it, including releasing a derivative proprietary product and keeping my modifications to myself. You may not like it and you're free to protest it, but it should be within my rights, at least if the OSS people are to be consistent. It may be consistent with for them to object to the copyright law that protects the proprietary product, but that's a distinctly seperate issue.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Marcus Brody]

Doh... I read the non-paragraph version, thinking jeez, why cant this guy break his post up to make it easier to read? Oh well....

OK OK OK you win... agreed. I guess by the sounds of this they have open sourced some of the game. I dont know which parts, but you would guess the more low-level stuff, so other people can build on top of it. Yes, this is the way linux should go. OS kernel + libraries + essential unix apps etc.... but then yeah, if you want someone to give you a really slick desktop or ace FPS or whatever, its fair enough that they charge for it, keep the source code & reap the rewards of their hardwork. Yes, I dont see any other way for Linux World Domination(tm). But then again... we have to be careful with this. Dont want to generate a new MS. Aswell as keeping all the low-level stuff Open, things like file specifications should be Open (XML, whatever) to stop ppl being "locked" into a certain product and ever spiralling liscense charges. Anyway.... what were we talking about again? Oh Fuc... forgot to put those darn paragraph breaks in ;-)

Re:They should have changed the name

[dvdeug]

As long as there is thieves, there will be locks. Any successful social system has some way to prevent those who would just take and hurt the system in doing so. So long as you can chose to steal, we have to protect our stuff. I see no obligation for someone in the free software community to allow themselves to be ripped off.

Re:They should have changed the name

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're confusing implementation with idea. With the GPL, if you wish to produce a proprietary piece of software with the same functionality as a piece of GPL'd code, you are NOT allowed use the actual source (the implementation) in your proprietary product (unless you negotiate a separate deal with the original copyright holder of the GPL'd code). The "price" of a piece of GPL software is not money, but a requirement for you to make you own code GPL too.

However, you ARE allowed clone the ideas behind the code - this is established, there is both legal precedent and a commonly used technique "clean-room reverse engineering", to do this - basically, you have two teams of developers. One team analyses the GPL'd code, and writes voluminous documentation and specifications. This team is now "dirty" and may not legally work on your proprietary project. They give the docs+ specs to the second team, who ground-up reimplement the GPL'd stuff.

This also works in reverse, and is, for example, they way in which the Wine and Samba crowd are legally allowed clone windows, or the way AMD are allowed clone Intel's chips.

So, you have some misconceptions over how the GPL and Open Source software works. hopefully, I have clarified them for you.

Re:They should have changed the name

[FallLine]

No, I'm confusing nothing. Idea == ANYTHING, not just a high level concept. In this case, I was referring to code.

Re:They should have changed the name

[FallLine]

I fully agree that it is your right to put conditions on your product. However, the fact of the matter is that this right descends from the same exact principles that proprietary software does. RMS and other parts of the OSS movement attack it, but they like to ignore their stake in it (even if it is misguided). That's my point.

That said, I do not believe that a GPL-style license is really necessary to prevent free software developers from being "ripped" off. What, precisely, is the harm of someone borrowing your code and not publishing their modifications? You and your buddies can still share your code every bit as well. You've not lost out financially. It seems to me that if you're going to give a gift to society at large, that it should be more in the style of the BSD license. Not only is that gift is more free without restrictions (by definition), but it can also do the greatest good. (e.g., Open AND Closed Source developers benefit)

Re:They should have changed the name

[dvdeug]

> What, precisely, is the harm of someone borrowing your code and not publishing their modifications?

Do you really want to compete with someone who has access and permission to use everything you do, but you don't have access or permission for any of their stuff? If GCC had been that way, we wouldn't have the massively multi-target multi-frontend compiler we have now; we would have a compiler supporting a few languages and a handful of targets, and thousands of buggy limited proprietary compilers based off GCC. C++, ObjC and Ada were all added in part because the GPL compelled the freeing of the code.

> It seems to me that if you're going to give a gift to society at large, that it should be more in the style of the BSD license.

If you want to give away a million dollars, do you throw it into the street, or do you carefully consider who to give it to and what conditions to put on it? Is it wrong to give a million dollars to a university to build a new library?

> it can also do the greatest good. (e.g., Open AND Closed Source developers benefit)

But the other 99% of the world - non-programmers - end up with more proprietary bugware and less working free software. If you want to do the greatest good, focuse on the largest number.

Re:They should have changed the name

[FallLine]

Do you really want to compete with someone who has access and permission to use everything you do, but you don't have access or permission for any of their stuff?

Well this point is really OT from my initial point [ that the FSF cannot say that information can never be property, but then try to enforce the GPL. ]. However, the only way your argument makes any sense is if you see Open Source to be an end into itself. I, and I believe most developers, simply do not start from this point of view. When I develop such software, I am aiming for the greatest good and/or my own edification, not to grow Open Source's marketshare for its own sake. The way I see it, when you release software under BSD you are every bit as likely to acquire future open contributions as you would under the GPL. Those that are willing to make contributions of their time for free are going to do it regardless, by and large. The GPL only ensures that closed source cannot take advantage of the code base. In other words, Open Source's gain under the GPL is only relative, not absolute.

Under a BSD-style license, if customers would rather spend 50 dollars more on proprietary extensions, then that is the greater good. If, however, the closed source additions simply crap it up, it's rather unlikely that people will buy in large numbers. Thus the propreitary line will die and become irrelevant. In other words, I believe allowing the free market, of sorts, to handle this is a far better method of contributing to this world.

If you want to give away a million dollars, do you throw it into the street, or do you carefully consider who to give it to and what conditions to put on it? Is it wrong to give a million dollars to a university to build a new library?

The difference is that this is not a zero sum game and that the money is finite, whereas my code can be used towards multiple ends at one time without wearing away at it. If I allow my code to be thrown in the "street", so what? Some incompetent coders my screw their modifications up. Other competent developers in Open and Closed Source can still make the most of my code.

But the other 99% of the world - non-programmers - end up with more proprietary bugware and less working free software.

Firstly, relatively little of this code was ever based in Open Source. Secondly, you're making an assumption that I disagree with, that Open Source is an inherantly better process than Closed Source. Thirdly, that, as I alluded to above, you are presuming that consumers are irrational and therefore incapable choosing the better product.

If you want to do the greatest good, focuse on the largest number.

What does this mean precisely?

Highly technical review

[7608]

Yes, that was a highly technical review, slashdot.... "It'll kick arse".

Thank you. Up next, we discover that the origins of calling your computer's case a "box" is also due to the lazy slashdot editors, who refuse to do a proper writeup...

Re:Highly technical review

[DGolden]

I have books from the dawn of the microcomputer age, and the name for the "box" of your computer back then was... "mainframe". At that stage, analogously to the "big" computer systems of the time (now called mainframes), that's what the "box" of a standard microcomputer was called, since it... was... the... main... frame... of the computer.

The keyboard/monitor/etc, were (still are) described as "peripherals". For some reason, "mainframe" didn't stick around for the microcomputer, and came to exclusively mean the big computers that IBM still make.

Personally, I like "chassis" for the main box.

Re:Highly technical review

[Grab]

"Don't eat yellow snow"?

I didn't realise there was a game option for the polar bear to piss himself on the way down... Or does Tux leave a _yellow_ groove in this version?

Grab.

Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The commercial version of Tux Racer is scheduled for release in the Summer of 2001. Sunspire has already had some success marketing the game but is still pursuing a serious publisher.

Hmm, wonder when that was written. It's now Winter 2002.

WAIT A MINUTE!!!

[skrowl]

Isn't closing the source on a GPL'd project a violation of the GPL?

Re:WAIT A MINUTE!!!

[Novus]

Isn't closing the source on a GPL'd project a violation of the GPL?

The original copyright holder is always free to relicense his code under whatever license he wishes. In other words, you can take GPL:ed code you have written, and put it under any license you like. However, if there's someone else's code in there, you'll have to remove it unless you get that person's permission.

Sunspire Studios had to rewrite parts of the game to get rid of other people's GPL:ed code, which they couldn't relicense.

Of course, the code on SourceForge is still GPL. They can't change that.

I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[lightspawn]

Race with the Super Mario characters.
Race with the Disney characters.
Race with the Looney Tunes characters.
Race with the Hanna Barbera characters.
Race with the Donkey Kong characters.
Race with the Star Wars characters.
Race with the Austin Powers characters.
Race with the South Park characters.
Race with the Muppet Show characters.
Race with the Disney characters again, except something went wrong and only three disney characters are there.

You know where were heading, don't you? Mary-Kate and Ashley mall racing, that's where.

God help us. God help us all.

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[jamesidm]

too late, I am too lazy to find an URL/search but there is a nickelodeon racers as well. I have seen it in EB here in the UK a few times.

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know where were heading, don't you? Mary-Kate and Ashley mall racing, that's where.

Oooh, you're not going to like the new racing game on the Xbox then starring Bill Gates with a big cartoon head driving around in a crazy snowmobile trying to run over the penguins.

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[Junks Jerzey]

You forgot:

Race with the Crash Bandicoot characters

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[big_cat79]

Hey, at least he Simpsons are different! They copied Crazy Taxi instead of Mario Kart!

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[Lumpy]

You know where were heading, don't you? Mary-Kate and Ashley mall racing, that's where.



If you do a cross of that with Unreal... You would have one of the highest selling games ever.

Re:I'm kinda sick of Franchise Racer by now...

[felipeal]

You know where were heading, don't you? Mary-Kate and Ashley mall racing, that's where.

It could be worse. Imagine a Clippy Racer for the X-Box...

what's the priceing going to be?

[mark_lybarger]

i'de personally pay about 5$, definately
anyone considering a fork on the gpl source to enhance it up to what these folks will probably charge 19.99$ for in the store? linux needs more kid-friendly games of this sort (though you're not going to be playing it with a non-opengl video card), but if linux users can't d/l it for
just my 0.02$

Re:what's the priceing going to be?

[kfg]

Interesting. I've been thinking, " Well, for $5 bucks I guess I might just buy the thing."

A few other posters, completely independantly, have mentioned the same price.

It's a supply and demand world out there in the land of the commercial product.

Guess what this game seems to be worth boys and girls.

KFG

Re:what's the priceing going to be?

[jonabbey]

Guess what this game seems to be worth boys and girls.

Well, it sounds like it's worth about $5 to you. Which means you may just not get to have a copy, I guess.

For me, I'd be willing to pay $30-$35 for it, as the original Open Source Tux Racer was a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm willing to pay up for the man-years of effort that have gone into the game since then.

In any case, Economics 101 says that the best way to price things in a free market is to find the optimum price, where the most money will be earned.. if someone out there was willing to pay one million dollars for their copy, then that's what SunSpire should charge.. million bucks free and clear, and if a second person ever wanted to buy it, then that's gravy..

In the real world, they'll probably price it somewhere in the 20-40 buck range, depending on how good they think the game is and how well they can market it. They'll hopefully get a good bunch of sales, then if their sales start to drop off, they'll put it on sale and maybe someday it'll be at a price even you, personally, can afford.

Open Source is well and good (I've spent the last 6 years working on a GPL'ed project), but Linux needs commercial software development to be successful.. it's okay if you have only a handful of Open Source databases, or only a couple of complete Open Source web servers, but if you want to get a consumer mass market, you need hundreds and thousands of games, and there's only so many people with the talent, desire, and disposable resources to produce open source games.

Re:what's the priceing going to be?

[mark_lybarger]

it needs commercial software, sure, but not commercial rapists. 20$ for this game is way out of line. sure it's "cute", but so is spyro on my playstation. sure the games are different, but really, this tuxracer is 1/4 the game that even spyro is (even after they enahnced the GPL version).

Re:This game will not succeed in the windows marke

[yatest5]

people who don't know or care about "tux" the linux mascot will turn their noses up at this game.

I think that's exactly what's going to happen. This is only 'newsworthy' because it has a little linux penguin in it, which to anyone who doesn't see their OS choice as a religious crusade, proof of dick size or something to justify their existence on the planet, is quite ridiculous.

However - mod me down guys - you love it ;-).

Why don't they sell a gpl version at retailers?

[Benjiman McFree]

Forget the fact you can download it for free, or have it included with your favorite linux distribution; convience of getting it off the shelf at best buy under the GPL GAME SECTION for five bucks a pop, is the way to go.

The proprietary version will probably be 30$ and they'll sell 10,000 or so vs. 75,000 gpl'd games at 5$ a pop.

--the temptation to exploit users through hidden code is too great for proprietary software. ie.. haven't they learned anything yet? 300,000 gross sales for propiretary version vs. 375,000 for gpl games, you do the math!

Re:Why don't they sell a gpl version at retailers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't the GPL version of the game have graphics and courses with scribbled "// Fix This!" all over the graphics (done by tigert in BrushedMetal theme)?

Open Source is great, however don't force it upon people who don't want to open source their products. People write software for a living you know - software that is good enough to not require support services. Games don't need support services - there is no market for single-player game support, only in selling the game itself. Sure, in multi-player games you can sell time on the server itself, but someone will just set up their own server anyway thus making the work worthless.

The art of coding should not be treated any differently from music creation or graphics creation. Why is coding considered to be less worthy? Let people write free opensource software if they wish, who are you to criticise them?

Re:Why don't they sell a gpl version at retailers?

[thedarkstorm]

Probably becuase the comment about 75,000 isn't going to happen. Most people don't pay for something they can download, especially a game. OpenSource is great, I use it and most of my friends use it. but for a commercial company, it isn't happening. Take a peak at RedHat, yes their doing well, but would they do well if RedHat was able to be purchased for $5? Nope. Yes, u CAN download a copy, but not for their higher-end stuff.

Re:Why don't they sell a gpl version at retailers?

[Asic Eng]

I'm not sure whether that would work, lowering the price doesn't necessarily mean more people will buy it. Many people will use the price as an indicator of it's worth. "Who wants to play a $5 game? It's bound to suck."

There is a certain validity to it, too - if I spend $5 on something which I won't enjoy, then I have just lost $5. If I spend $30 and get a game which I enjoy for months, then I've made a good buy.

I'm not saying the game is bad (I don't really know) just arguing that a lower price won't necesserily cause higher sales.

Re:TROLL A MINUTE!!!

[PhilHibbs]

The GPL is a grant of additional rights, that you the user has. It in no way restricts the original copyright owner from exercising their right to exploit their copyright in other ways. So long as no-one else contributed to the current code base, the fact that prior versions were GPL is irrelevant.

Kickass feature to have..

[letoram]

Didn't see it anywhere on the site, but most competitors in the down-hill snowracers business (as in snowboard games & the likes although few on the PC) always features a bunch of tricks you can preform to obtain higher scores. Something that really increases the replay value. Or why not add weapons and downhill-deathmatch?

Imagine a 360-inverse-tux-flip or perhaps a tux-slide.. There's no end to the possibilities =)

That put aside, the linux version wil be mine.

Re:Kickass feature to have..

[mmaddox]

Actually, with a gamepad, you CAN stunt. Push button 'B' (I think...someone correct me) and hold down your pad in the direction you want to spin or flip. I'm not sure what the corresponding keypresses might be.

Re:Kickass feature to have..

[terrabit]

In the windows version of the game, you can use 'E' to jump and then hit 'D' to spin.

Re:Kickass feature to have..

[Molt]

Does this mean that before this version this truly was an 'OpenSource movement'?

on the Game Cube?

[the_2nd_coming]

I think this is the perfect platform to place this game on. This game is perfect for kids of all ages, which Nintendo prids them selves on having a platform of the same ideology. This could bring HUGE exposure to the game and probably be the place where it is most successful since consols make for better multiplayer splitscreen platforms than the Computer.

Re:on the Game Cube?

[praxim]

Actually, what I was wonder was: what would happen if Nintendo were to take the source to a GPL'd game, port it to the GameCube, and release it? They could release the source code without worry, because the game already exists on the PC and nobody's going to be able to compile it themselves for the GC.

Similarly, what would prevent me from making modifications to a program under the GPL and using my own *cough* preprocessor *cough* to compile the code in a secretive way? Ex: while (1) { DO_COOL_STUFF /* >=) */ }

Re:on the Game Cube?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL states "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains" -- That means that a GPL console game would need to be released with a GPL development kit, which ain't going to happen.

Re:on the Game Cube?

[mscout1]

Better Yet...
Port TuxRacer the XBox and watch Bill head explode as he realizes that his game system is now an avertising media for Linix!

Why?

[EnglishTim]

Why should they be free?

Why shouldn't the person who created the code/art be entitled to compensation for the work they put in?

This is one of the things that I really don't understand about RMS's philosophy. He asks 'how can it be wrong to share a program with one's friend?' without asking 'how can it be fair to make use of another person's work without compensating them for the effort they put into it?'

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If *I* write a program, piece of music, etc. I should have the write to share it with my friend. But I don't need a GPL to do that. I think it's more a matter of respecting the creator's rights. If I want the world to make free use of something I've done, fine. But I should have control over my own intellectual property (including the ability to declare I don't want control over it or that I want compensation for it) and those wishes should be respected as courtesy good [insert your favorite religion here] ethics.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes yes, that's all fine and good, but the fucking morons here think that "Intellectual Property," I.E. works of art, music, methodology, things that may or may not have a tangible meaning in "real world" or that only have value to those with some sort of Intellect is an invalid concept. Apparently, fresh ideas just sprout forth from God's Ass and, as such, no one has ownership of anything, because God thought it first.

Penguins @ Warp Speed

[chargen]

You can! There's a level slope and elevation parameter in the level config file. Just set the slope to 90 degrees and take off! My girlfriend got up to 757km/h once. Here is the screenshot to prove it! Notice there's no ground... hehehe

-Pete

Re:Penguins @ Warp Speed

[BadDoggie]

Dude,

Your girlfriend needed 1'20" to fall down an entire course? She's a blonde, huh?

woof.

No need to mod this down (No Score +1 Bonus already); I know I'm feeding trolls when I'm replying to someone who posts here, plays Tux Racer and claims to have a girlfriend.

It's kinda neat but..

[Junta]

I remember downloading it and thinking it was kinda neat. An OpenGL game written with linux in mind, and it's somewhat entertaining. While I think it above many other GPL games in many respects, I don't think it's so great as to be worth anything money wise when you look at the market out there.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward and boring. Doesn't even seem as interesting as, say, the snowboarding mini-game in Final Fantasy VII, which wasn't even meant to stand on its own. Snowboarding games and the like typically offer a significant deal more than TuxRacer, and for this reason if I was going to shell out cash for a game of this genre, I'd go with a good game.

For another thing, the graphics are not that spectacular. The scenery has some nice textures, but the characters and objects are simple gouraud shaded polygons, and even then the polygon count in the player models and how they are put together is now substandard. I understand that having a low polygon count helps performance, but companies like Square show how you can really have some decent looking graphics without complex geometry.

All in all it was a neat little game that kept my attention for a few minutes when I first got it. It's not on the level of any commercial competition in my opinion, considering games from 97 have roughly equivalent graphics and the gameplay is really boring and repetitive, with next to nothing to spruce it up.

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[gwillden]

From your comments about playing the game I assume that you are talking about the 0.61 version of the game. If you look at the mailing list archives You will see that the developers have completely redone all of the rendered models, physics, collision detection etc. It's a very different game apparently.

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[squaretorus]

This gets me thinking about the DV revolution. I can walk into any electronics hop and buy all the kit I need to make a movie for about £3000, not a hell of a lot of money.

I can walk out and make my own movie with some friends. The resulting movie can be truly great. It wont have the effects of the Matrix, or the babes (unless I happen to know some talented 'ass' - which I don't) but it can be great. Ideas make movies. It can be great. It could make it to a film festival, do a small run in small cinemas / video screens and get a small release on video.

I can also gather a bunch of people together and write a snow boarding game. Unless it brings something new to the genre then it'll just be mediocre or crap. It can look pretty through good design, it can play well through refined physics, it can be good. It'd take years. It _could_ be good. At a push.

But I could make a movie in a couple of months with no money just using my spare time - it'd be a short most likely - but it _could_ quite easily be cool.

Can a game in an established style ever be worth £30 when on the same shelf as something that cost literally millions to develop and is supremely polished?

Most people would agree a movie is a movie is a movie - some are bargain priced on video/DVD - but on the whole they cost the same.

Games, on the other hand, are different. If Tux Racer is justifiably likened to a mini game in FFVII how can it be justified in charging £30?

I used to write games on my old Ataris - they were shit, but we enjoyed playing them (racing platformers mainly - now THERE is a dead genre to resurrect). We enjoyed them because we could dick about with them and speed characters up, slow them down, turn gravity upside down etc... the games themselves were painfully mediocre - actually it was all the same game at various points on its evolution.

I always thought jeff minters games were kinda cruddy - they were small, the graphics were small - but I loved playing them and always paid double the shareware fee because I enjoyed the idea of feeding camels. Thats the territory I see TuxRacer inhabiting, not the boxed £30 games shelf.

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[Howie]

Jeff Minter is one of very few people still making games with old skool sensibilities. Mad speed, flashing screens full of enemies. Defender II, Llamatron and Iridis Alpha all sit on my all-time favourite list, and I'd pay for them again today. No-one else makes games like that anymore, and I don't think that's a good thing.

Fashionable gameplay models should preclude previous or new ideas - currently the favourites would FPS and MMORPG/RTS, I suppose, but a look a MAME's listings shows a glut of horizontal scrolling beat-em-ups in the early 90's (green beret, golden axe, x-men etc etc), and scrolling shooters with ever-increasing powerups in the late 80's (r-type, gradius, 1942 etc etc).

I have a soft spot a few top-down 2d games that could stand a makeover as networked multiplayer games, but wouldn't be interesting to most in the current market (Paradroid, and Halls Of The Things). Personally, I'd rather pay 30UKP for a nicely remade Paradroid than FFn, which leaves me cold, regardless of how much it cost.

(Where is Andrew Braybrook nowadays?)

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[Junta]

That's good to hear, but has the gameplay changed significantly from just being able to basically slide left and right? The graphics in the screenshots still seem sub-standard to me.

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[nanobug]

So was that version 0.6 or thereabouts that you downloaded?
Why don't you have a look at version 1.0 before making such a harsh judgement - you may find it has improved dramatically.

Re:It's kinda neat but..

[DGolden]

Truly tragic story:
http://www.graftgold.com/now.html


Andrew Braybrook:

moved back to commercial programming at Eurobase Systems Ltd when Graftgold ceased trading. He is a Senior Programmer working on client/server database applications for the insurance market.


Shiver. Braybrook's games were some of the best ever. I'd say he probably couldn't bear games coding for such an ugly-to-program platform as the Wintel architecture for very long, after the comparitive bliss of Amiga games programming...

a funky polar bear

[ackthpt]

Looks like the authors have the same problem seperating the poles as Gary Larson lamented. Oh, well, it's just a game. ;-)

Re:a funky polar bear

[Eccles]

Commandos 2 seems to have the same problem (penguins and polar bears at a Nazi base), and they're generally trying to be fairly realistic. Sigh...

I bet there was a meeting regarding that game where a geek programmer tried to point out that penguins are southern hemisphere only but a marketing guy overruled him because penguins are cute and funny.

Ok, so fuck the penguin, okay?

[Anonymous Coward]

willkommen im meinem Garten.

Listen to more Scooter.

Penguin Adventure

[Anonymous Coward]

It reminds me of two games I used to play a lot in my MSX system. They were called 'Antartida Adventure', its second version was 'Penguin Adventure', by Konami both of them. It featured a little penguin (symbol of Konami) skating in Antartida to save his girlfriend, avoiding dangers, catching fishes, swimming in the ocean and the like. Couldn't find any mention in TuxRacer's site about them, thou.

Re:TROLL A MINUTE!!!

[MrEd]

Bu - Bu - But... Bill Gates said it was like a virus!

GPL fork

[Aglanor]

The GPL fork is named Openracer and now is part of the Worldforge project, you can check it here: http://openracer.worldforge.org

Cost & availability?

[Spoing]

The sunspire web site doesn't have any details on how much or when...the last bit of news is from October 2nd. :(

It looks like a good gift for the holiday season!

Girl Tux or Boy Tux?

[Anonymous Coward]

With that particular perspective of Tux going down the hill, I was wondering how they were going to differentiate between a girl Tux and a boy Tux. Looking at the screenshots, I am glad they decided on a bow and a pink snowsuit :]

Openracer

[svara]

The tuxracer 0.61 tree has been forked - it is called Openracer and stays GPL.

They try to move away from the original game, though, in order not to interfere with the commerical versions' development.

Their site is at:
http://moria.mit.edu:8080/wf/dev/systems/release s/ OpenRacer

You can check the source out from cvs using CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous:@cvs.openracer.sourceforge.net: /cvsroot/openracer

Please note that it will need the newest plib version from CVS, too, though.

Re:Openracer

[McQualude]

Corrected Link

Not much to see yet.

"TROLL A MINUTE"???

[timbo_red]

Not everyone who doesn't know everything about the GPL is a troll you know. I would have asked the same question if it wasn't already there, it simply read like a genuine query to me.

Re:"TROLL A MINUTE"???

[Anonymous Coward]

his homepage is the windows 2000 product page at microsoft.

enough said

Re:"TROLL A MINUTE"???

[PhilHibbs]

Maybe, but I've seen this myth so often that I was just a little peeved. The FUD coming from Microsoft that the GPL is viral or restrictive needs to be countered loudly.

The next racing game

[Anonymous Coward]

I kinda figured we'd exhausted so many franchises that the next racing game would just be pornographic.

You know where were heading, don't you? Mary-Kate and Ashley mall racing, that's where.

Or are you one step ahead of me?

Who are they kidding?

[MicroBerto]

Is anyone seriously going to PAY MONEY for a game where you're a penguin moving down a hill trying to slide into fish?

Give me a break.

Re:Who are they kidding?

[glwtta]

It is my firm belief that people buying games will pay for absolutely anything - only that explains the incredible amount of complete crap out there.

Can't play with it :(

[Chatterton]

Every time I start TuxRacer I have the main menu, but when i try to start a game i have a black screen and no more control of my keyboard. I just could push 8 seconds on the big red button of my tower :(((
(no, no, i can't kill it from another comp has i never run telnet)

Re:Can't play with it :(

[Anonymous Coward]

install ssh:) Also check your system w/the requirements, not sure, but doesnt this require glx?

Is this Legal? [Re:Open To Closed]

[Irvu]

Is this even Legal? My understanding of the GPL is that all derivative versions of a GPL'd work must remain GPL'd. Thus preventing people form taking someone else's free work and profiting by it.

How can they legally make this shift?

And what does RMS have to say about it?

Re:Is this Legal? [Re:Open To Closed]

[42forty-two42]

The copyright holder has special powers. Future versions that they make can be relicenced, but old versions remain free\b\b\b\bFree.

Re:Is this Legal? [Re:Open To Closed]

[AndrewHowe]

It's simply because they (Sunspire) are the original authors of the code. When they placed it under the GPL, they did not lose the right to give it to anyone under a different license.
It's not a derivative work! It's the original work!

Re:(DefinItely, TROLL)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled definitely. With an 'i'. NO A.

Re:(DefinItely, TROLL)

[Anonymous Coward]

a spelling error, and the post is a troll. excellent.

No on contributed???

[Anonymous Coward]

No one contributed to tux racer?!? Even after this many years? That's rather shocking if true. If not, well, I know I'd be pissed to hell and back if I helped develop something and they stole the one reason for it existing, namely having a game to tweak/play with at the code level.

We need another closed "kart" game like we need another brand of soap. Whoopety frikkin do.

Re:No on contributed???

[AbsoluteRelativity]

As long as the copyright notice still lists the owner(s) and your contribution does not add your name to its ownership it doesnt matter.

> If not, well, I know I'd be pissed to hell and back if I helped develop something and they stole the one reason for it existing, namely having a game to tweak/play with at the code level.

There still should be a game to tweak/play with at the code level. They can take the previous GPL versions off of their site, *but* they can not force any one to get rid of it, or not use it on their own. The previous GPL versions should be still free to use, modify, and even to create alternative/derivative versions of it on your own, but only as GPL, at least if you make a large enough changes ownership should change, and you should be able to do some of the same things.

Re:This game will not succeed in the windows marke

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, the game IS fun for about 20 minutes.

openracer builds on the GPL-version of tuxracer

[gnalle]

It seems that I am the only karma whore on the line that still remember about the openracer project:
http://moria.mit.edu:8080/wf/dev/systems/OpenRacer

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/02/202621 9&mode=thread

Re:This game will not succeed in the windows marke

[StikyPad]

Good point! Conversely, I bought Sonic because I thought it was a game about a bunch of roller-skating waitresses in tiny skirts.

...

BSD Daemon vs. Tux

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all this game needs is the ability to play as the bsd daemon so we can see which character really kicks ass.

"Might be fun for a child?"

[raindog2]

OK, I'll admit that the one child I've tried Tux Racer out on enjoyed it a lot. But most people who aren't hardcore gamers will find even the free version pretty enjoyable.

I couldn't care less about Half-life or Diablo, and don't get me started about Super 3D Virtua Kick The Shit Out Of Rendered Anime Guys Champion Edition. I play a lot of MAME and newer games with outstanding gameplay like Bomberman, Myst, Quake 2, and Chu Chu Rocket. As far as racing goes I haven't really seen anything since Road Rash that was fun, and really Road Blasters was pretty much the pinnacle of fantasy driving experience. I can't imagine myself ever playing a snowboarding game, but Tux Racer is kinda pretty, whimsical, easy to pick up in 30 seconds and put down when you're bored with it, and satisfying.

Playing it with adult family members leads me to the same conclusion. For the 80% of the population who's never touched a Playstation 2, games like Tux Racer are an embarassment of riches. Finding out that it "just comes with Linux" just makes them sort of stare blankly and then a month later ask me if they should run Linux instead of Windows. (I still haven't answered "yes" to anyone because things like Reader Rabbit and American Greetings don't work under WINE yet.)

I'm not sure it'll make it if it ever gets to retail shelves, even with all the extra nice stuff I see in the screenshots -- I kind of expect to see it in the 10 dollar bin at Staples or computer shows pretty quickly -- but the vast middle ground of people who like games but not enough to know what "CTF" stands for or buy a Playstation are the perfect market for Tux Racer.

At any rate, I'm going to pick up a copy just so my partner and I can race each other in real time instead of having to take turns.

Fun for all ages...

[McQualude]

Unlike most games, my daughter and I could sit down and play this together; both of us enjoying it. It wasn't too difficult for a 5 year old (or a 30 year old ;) either.

You are missing the best of the bunch...

[CandyMan]

Race with the Crash Bandicoot characters

Tux Racer will not sell well, IMHO.

[chipuni]

The website says:

That being said, we're still confident that Tux Racer will be available for purchase on our website by Christmas, and will be availble [sic] in retail in the new year.

In other words, Sunspire Studios won't have Tux Racer out in time for the biggest shopping season for games.

Payment in advance? Of course!

[Haeleth]

If you want to be paid for writing something, or making something, then obviously - don't make it until people have paid you to.

Great idea! As a matter of fact, I'm just about ready to start work on a killer app that's going to blow MS out of the water, and improve your productivity no end. I'll have it written within a week of starting, I promise you. I just need you to send a reasonable sum of money to my PayPal account...

Oh, and while you're about it, I know of a great investment opportunity in the South Sea.

Seriously, nobody's going to pay in advance for software. Your idea would mean the death of independent software. Unless you were aiming for a "funny" moderation, of course, in which case I salute you.

why Windows is on top

[perky]

From the Tuxracer manual:

installation for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000


Obtain the tuxracer-win32-.zip file from the Downloads page.

Unzip this file to your hard drive. You will need a program like Winzip to do this.

You're done!

installation for Linux


Make sure you have (and have correctly installed) the following libraries:

An implementation of the OpenGL API version 1.1 or greater (Mesa versions >= 3.2 work; see http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net). Note that you will need a hardware-accelerated implementation of OpenGL in order for Tux Racer to be playable.
The GLUT library, version 3.7 beta or greater. This is distributed in the MesaDemos package, so if you have installed Mesa you probably also have GLUT. Otherwise, see http://www.opengl.org.
Tcl Version 8.0 or greater.
(Optional) Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) Version 1.1.1 or greater. This is required for joystick support.
(Optional) SDL_mixer Version 1.0 or greater. This is required for sound and music support.

Obtain the tuxracer-.tar.gz and tuxracer-data-.tar.gz files from the Downloads page.

Unpack the code tarball:

shell$ tar xvfz tuxracer-.tar.gz
shell$ cd tuxracer-

Configure for your system:

shell$ ./configure

Many people will be able to run configure without passing any options. The more commonly-used configure options are:

--prefix=DIR: Specify where to install tuxracer. (The tuxracer binary will be placed in DIR/bin)
--with-tcl-libs=DIR: Specify Tcl library location
--with-tcl-inc=DIR: Specify Tcl header file location
--with-tcl-lib-name=NAME: Specify Tcl library base name
--with-gl-libs=DIR: Specify OpenGL library location
--with-gl-inc=DIR: Specify OpenGL header file location
--with-glut-libs=DIR: Specify GLUT library location
--with-glut-inc=DIR: Specify GLUT header file location
--enable-stencil-buffer: Use if your hardware has a stencil buffer
--with-data-dir=PATH: Location of tuxracer data directory (can be also configured in options file later)
Run ./configure --help for a complete list of options.

Compile:

shell$ make

Tux Racer should compile cleanly, with few (if any) warnings. Please see the FAQ or our Support page if Tux Racer fails to compile.

Install the tuxracer binary:

shell$ make install

Unless you specified the --prefix option when you ran configure, this command will install the tuxracer binary in /usr/local/bin

Install the data files:

shell$ cd /usr/local/share
shell$ tar xvfz /path/to/tuxracer-data-.tar.gz
shell$ mv tuxracer-data- tuxracer

You may install the data files anywhere you wish, but tuxracer looks in /usr/local/share/tuxracer by default.

You're done!

Re:why Windows is on top

[rasactive]

You still have to have the libraries in windows, you stupid troll. It's just that they don't come with Linux and you have the choice of downloading them, rather than coming with windows, and having them take up your hard drive space when you're not even using them.
Or you could just download the static binary.

Re:why Windows is on top

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiight. So you're comparing the installation of a Win32 binary with compiling from source on linux. Don't you think it would be easier to grab the linux binaries???

Re:why Windows is on top

[perky]

Show me the RPM on their website. I agree with what you are saying: they are not technically comparable operations, but as far as the average user is concerned they are identical. "What do I have to do to be able to play the game?" Most uesrs don't care about the route. They care about the destination.

Re:No one contributed???

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the copyright notice still lists the owner(s) and your contribution does not add your name to its ownership it doesnt matter.

BZZZT Sorry, but unless the contributors specifically assign the copyright to the original author they are still copyright holders. This is one reason why the FSF requires the reassignment (so they can change license versions) and why it has been said closing linux would be impossible (because you could never get all the permisions you need).

There still should be a game to tweak/play with at the code level. They can take the previous GPL versions off of their site, *but* they can not force any one to get rid of it, or not use it on their own. The previous GPL versions should be still free to use, modify, and even to create alternative/derivative versions of it on your own, but only as GPL, at least if you make a large enough changes ownership should change, and you should be able to do some of the same things.

But we are talking about their product here. Something where they took their open project and "finished" it off closed. And probably trademarked the name, too. "OpenRacer" is even dumber than "Tux Racer" and sounds even less like a kart game. No one can recode TuxRacer, which is the game people are playing and hearing about. OpenRacer has so much intangible distance to make up, and this is still all because an open project closed. And the licensing/ownership does NOT change just because the forked version has made "enough" changes. (Not that I'm complaining about it being forced to stay GPL, mind you).

That doesn't matter...

[lowe0]

Point is, all that stuff is there and waiting when you need it. That convenience is worth something.

The vast majority of people do not wish to spend time looking for libraries, or downloading and compiling source, or any of that stuff. They want it all ready for them.

My freshman year, I had a C professor who watched my pitiful attempts to find the optimal solution to a sorting problem. This thing would be rarely used, and not all that critical, and not often executed. He told me, "Let it go. Programmer time is always more expensive than CPU time." Point is, you have to look at the optimal solution in terms of preserving what's valuable rather than what's technically superior. Make a person go through 5 minutes of work to save $.12 worth of hardware and they'll run away from your solution like it's coated in anthrax.

My time is far more valuable than the 25MB of hard drive space DirectX takes up. I'm glad it's installed by default in WinXP. I was able to get my XP box up and gaming in ten minutes. It's been a month, and I still can't get my Linux box to run quake3.

Re:That doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a month, and I still can't get my Linux box to run quake3.

Thats pretty sad. Either the computers don't have equal hardware or you aren't very good with linux...

Re:That doesn't matter...

[BigBir3d]

My time is far more valuable than the 25MB of hard drive space DirectX takes up. I'm glad it's installed by default in WinXP. I was able to get my XP box up and gaming in ten minutes. It's been a month, and I still can't get my Linux box to run quake3.

uhhhh, I suck at trying to configure Linux and even I could get quake3 working relatively quickly.

This is yet another reason for different distro's.

Re:That doesn't matter...

[BigBir3d]

My time is far more valuable than the 25MB of hard drive space DirectX takes up. I'm glad it's installed by default in WinXP. I was able to get my XP box up and gaming in ten minutes. It's been a month, and I still can't get my Linux box to run quake3.

uhhhh, I suck at trying to configure Linux and even I could get quake3 working relatively quickly.

This is yet another reason for different distro's.

Are you are you saw the screenshots?

[Nailer]

1.0 is a completely different game from 0.61. Yes, nobody would buy 0.61, its a vey ancient tech demo.

In 0.61 you:
* Skied / jumped down a slope
* Tried to race on icy bits to get the lowest time
* Collected herring which didn't do anything
* Enjoyed the occasional jump
* Stop moving when you hit something

In 0.1
* Race opponents (computer controled and split screen)
* Deal with hazard like falling ice blocks, moving vehicles, giant boulders, interfering opponents, logs across your path, stumps, moving cable cars, ice spikes, falling snow, etc.
* Have cool ice tunnels to use centrifugal force to climbs the walls within
* Actually collect herring to contribute to your score, which can be places in the sky and only accessible via jumping from a ramp or perhaps a hidden rooftop, making the game much more challenging
* Ski through slopes, towns, ice tunnels, fountains, roads, etc. More detailed backgrounds and artwork make the levels much more unique and complex, check out the realistic trees and beautiful sunsets
* Stop moving when you hit something in a way that makes it seem like you actually hit something
* The path may diverge in more than one direction, meaning there can be hidden shortcuts.

1.0 is nothing like 0.61. Yes, 0.61 sucks as a videogame (as I said, its an ancient tech demo) but 1.0 (from the screenshots and trailer movie) looks like being a quality game up there with most Nintendo titles, and, more to the point, worth my cash.

Re:No one contributed???

[AbsoluteRelativity]

> BZZZT Sorry, but unless the contributors specifically assign the copyright to the original author they are still copyright holders. This is one reason why the FSF requires the reassignment (so they can change license versions) and why it has been said closing linux would be impossible (because you could never get all the permisions you need).

It really depends on what you mean by "contribution". How big of a contribution. A bug fix is one form of a contribution, it is usually contributed in the form of a patch. In most cases people who contribute small things don't place their own copyrights on what they contribute, and no license to them. Contributing a driver for example is a big contribution, contributing a number of functions is also a big contribution, at least its easier to copyright. Copyrighting an simple algorithm is really pushing it, that is like trying to copyright a picture of a rectangle.

> And probably trademarked the name, too.

Well I am sure many people would not like it if another OS named itself Linux.

> "OpenRacer" is even dumber than "Tux Racer" and sounds even less like a kart game.

Well why can't the name be more creative?

> OpenRacer has so much intangible distance to make up, and this is still all because an open project closed.

Yes but who took it that distance?

> And the licensing/ownership does NOT change just because the forked version has made "enough" changes.

BS, if I as a single developer, took the code and used it as a starting base, but in the end recoded everything and removed all my dependancies on the original code, that is made huge enough changes, then ownership would change. This is about limitations in copyright law, not limitations in the (L)GPL. This is less likely to happen with something as large and complex as Linux, but in smaller less complex projects it should not be.

*sigh*

[On Lawn]

Theres always someone trying to look highbrow by calling something "sub-par"

But you can stunt already

[kimihia]

Last version of Tuxracer I played was old and crusty from many months ago, but it did have the capacity to do stunts and tricks.

Hold down the jump key, wait until it powers up, then release it and slam a direction key. You'll spin end of end, flipper over shoulder, or even do a fancy horizontal pirouette.

It's all in there ... you just gotta read the docs. (Docs weren't added to make the gzip larger.)

Portability

[fsterman]

How portable is it? Did they try to make sure the code is easy to move to another platform? How hard is it on the system software and how expansive are the levels?

You can't play any of those on PC, though

[Halcyon-X]

Have you noticed that those are all console games? Tux racer is filling a HUGE void on the PC, where we have next to no mascot racers whatsoever.

Finally, we see a game company seeing how viable a certain genre is and bringing it over to PC. You can't argue that we have an overflow of fighting games, platformers, console-style RPGs, arcade racing, or shooters (Gradius, Contra) on PC either, btw.

this game sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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