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

Hot Goat

[Dolphy]

This release will be noteworthy to both developers and end users who just want to see "see what it's like". Soon after getting Slashdotted so long ago, Croquet.org removed the download and (basically) hasn't updated since. The vast majority of the (casual) interest in the project had to be stemmed off until now. As such, I'm sure we can expect the site to get hit with both old techies who never got a chance to see it, as well as new ones who are just hearing about it for the first time.

Re:this is great stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Err me again, one of the coolest things I've ever wanted for 3d spaces (games included in this) is that voice chat does not come over a seperate "channel" but instead eminates from a persons avatar just as their normal voice would.

If some programmer could impliment that into croquet for me, it would be the killer voip app too. It'd be the killer colaboration app.

Could be the newst thing on the linux desktop.

Only unix-like systems are set up to have so many local yet restricted guests, windows has miles to go. Imagine a croquet-space DE replacing gnome and KDE with voice chat, zeroconf awareness of other people on LAN, and specific customisable VPN-like stuff for the internet.

Add voice chat, P2P, database-like filesystem, that voice recognition IBM just released to interface with searches and other things. Cron jobs and scripts could have physical personages.

Walk up to the firewall room that has "security" written on the door, root pass then enter through the door, has a graphical display of a current netstat on the walls, and a terminal for modifying the rulesets, and a "book" on the ground with the logs in it and another "book" full of howtos to all the commands and firewalls in general. Instead of "press f1 for help, or type man ******" it could be "always look for the blue book in whichever room you are in, it will have all the answers".

People, if we could get closer to that, we could pwn microsoft. The key is that it allows a whole level of abstraction away from the cmd line, whilst still retaining it.

Things like zeroconf and standards are important for this though.

"blessedly simple" license

[sacrilicious]

Timothy says:

Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.

The license says:

Copyright (c) 2002-2004 by Viewpoints Research Institute... 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.

I'm honestly not trying to be a dope here, but I find this troublingly ambiguous. Two main questions:

• Does the requirement to include the above notice apply only to source distributions, or also to binary distributions? If the latter, then I suppose there must be something like a menu item which brings up this notice? How would it even make sense to include the notice in a binary, given that a binary can't be merged or readily modified? Is there an unstated implication that source must accompany such a binary?
• The license refers to "this software". Including this license in a different product which incorporated Viewpoint's software would seem to indicate that likewise the different product was also being licensed under the same terms, i.e. free for any use including modification, merging, and distribution. Is this the intent of this license?

Re:"blessedly simple" license

[Fnkmaster]

The license you find troublingly ambiguous is also known as the MIT License. It's identical. And the MIT License has been used for years on many successful software products. Is is as well-honed as the Modified BSD license? Not quite, but some people seem to prefer it because it's so damned simple. What part of "deal without restriction" and "including, without limitation" don't you understand? It means do whatever you want as long as you keep the Copyright notice intact somewhere in the software.

The license applies to binary and source form distributions, they are generally held to both be covered by copyright law, so they are both implicitly under the license. Almost EVERY Open Source license has this clause in it. People generally put the copyright notice in the documentation accompanying the binaries (documentation files are included in their definition of "the Software"), in a README file, or you can probably compile it as a string if you prefer. If the license doesn't specify, then anything that complies with the license can be presumed to be valid.

As for "this software", the license only applies to _this software_. Not to other software that you write, that links to this software - that's the way copyright law works, unless you put unusual clauses in place like the GPL does.

You are looking for surprises where there aren't any. This isn't some strange new license, it's just the simplest possible Open Source license (whether you think this means it's the best is a different issue).

I just imagined ..

[ciupman]

.. listening music though my virtual xmms player. The player could be or not attached to my avatar position, in case i wanted the music to folow me or not .. the sound would have 3d positioning (routed somewhat from the real xmms application to a crocket sound output interface), anyone who "aproachs" my avatar would start listening to music gradually (only if the sound output is activated from their side).. This thing has millions of applications, and imho, is the only 3d desktop that would make sence, why? Because of it's resource sharing with others.. This is way too cool! ;)