On The Difficulty Of Developing Open Source Games

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Competitive Enterprise Institute essay for discussing lessons learned by looking at the history of open-source games (PDF link, text version as posted to Politech list.) The piece suggests that "generally, games have not been a success story for the open source community", arguing that "...the consensus among gamers and developers is that open source games still lag behind proprietary games in originality, sophistication, and artwork; many are clones of earlier proprietary or shareware games." It notes that "...the open source business model seems to have trouble coming up with large initial investments at the cutting edge of innovation, where risks are greatest", and then suggests some larger lessons for governmental public policy on open-source software.

Comments

Motivation of virus writers

[GuyMannDude]

While there are a plethera of worms and viruses directed at Windows because of the political proclivities of hackers...

I'm guessing the main reasons people write worms for Windows in not because of some ideological disagreement with Microsoft but probably because (a) Windows is riddled with security holes, (b) tons of people use Windows, and (c) a worm or virus activated by a common user on a Windows machine can do lots of damage to system files.

GMD