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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.
Wtf? This is modded up?
Yeah, us programmers. Easy work with lots of free time. Why just yesterday I rolled out of bed around 11AM, scooted off to work for an hour or so, then came back home to work on my open source project.
Ahhh, drawing, that's hard work my friend. Manly work. Many is the day I've seen tortured, broken, artists rubbing their nubby, dirty, worn fingers; sore from the back breaking illustration marathons.
In my experience, as a programmer married to an artist, they're not too different.
The fact is *most* open source projects are done by students or the unemployed. There are exceptions to that where there is a business supporting the product (i.e. apache or the linux kernel) but the majority of projects are done by students.
Artists would release their work into the public domain for the same reason people writing GPLd code do. Recognition, enjoyment, chicks, whatever.
However I think the concept of open source, giving something away that could be sold is pretty unique to software development right now. I find it humorous that people just give away all their work myself.