Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release

kourge writes "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted. Today, Croquet Project released its initial developer release, codenamed 'Jasmine.' Although it isn't a finished product, it still is complete enough for developers to develop in Croquet. Croquet itself is written in Squeak, a branch of the Smalltalk language. Please remember to download Croquet via BitTorrent, which provides faster speeds and won't overload the server." The idea is ambitious: An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it. Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.

Comments

Corquet License

[Anonymous Coward]

croquet license

Copyright (c) 2002-2004 by Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. and other individual, corporate, and institutional contributors who have collectively contributed elements of the CroquetTM software code to the Croquet Project. CroquetTM is a trademark of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc..

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Re:Corquet License

[nels_tomlinson]

You can do anything you like.

You can't stop others from doing anything they like.

Looks more like the BSD license to me.

Well, the BSD license would say:

You can do anything you want.

You can stop others from doing anything they want.

That's the essential difference between the GPL and the BSD licenses: you can fork BSD and take it proprietary (the proprietary part is the part where you stop others from doing whatever they want, like distributing your fork.).

The BSD license gives you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others. The GPL does not. It's sort of like the difference between the Union and the Confederacy (U.S., circa 1860-1864): the Union restricted the freedom of slave owners, the Confederacy didn't. Did that mean that the Confederacy was a free-er place than the Union?

Torrents

[jaaron]

Windows
Mac
Linux


Though they want you to agree to the license before you can get to those links.

Alan Kay

[VP]

It looks like one of the project leaders is Alan Kay, whose team at Xerox developed the "window and mouse" interface...

Demo'd at Freenix

[po8]

Dave Reed did an extensive Croquet demo at the Freenix Track of the Usenix ATC this year. Seemed really cool, but at the time was too buggy to be usable. Basically, Croquet lets you put all kinds of interesting workspaces in a collaborative 3D virtual world: sort of the logical completion of the virtual world description languages that were popular some years ago. Must be a Smalltalk guru to play, it looks like. Has a fancy synchronization protocol that takes care of most lag issues.

Let's hope that the bugs are sufficiently out that we can have big fun with this. I'm looking forward to trying it.

Croquet demo video

[cabinessence]

You can find some great video clips of Alan Kay demoing Croquet here. Well worth watching, this is much more than just a 3D desktop.

Sigh...Hear the music.

[Anonymous Coward]

And one can be quite productive in it too.

Re:I installed it at 2am this morning

[buckycowpie]

Here is a blog from David A. Smith, one of the developers.

Re:What is this built on?

[killjoe]

It's a VM. Just like any other VM.

Re:some personal comments, all negative

[Abcd1234]

Sounds like you might be interested in Squeak-E.