In my role as the creator and maintainer of the roguelike game ADOM I'd like to comment this (especially since this posting spawned an ugly thread on rec.games.roguelike.adom):
First of all I'm not taking advantage on the open source community at all. The sources of ADOM have been written from scratch and do not use any parts from other open source roguelike games (like Nethack or Angband). Anybody stating the contrary is lying in a blatant and annoying fashion.
It is also not true, that ADOM *originally* released with the caveat of releasing the sources for ADOM 1.0.0. When ADOM first got released, open source (or not) never was an important topic and initially I released ADOM to see if there was any interest in the game. Whether sources would be released or not became a topic after a year or two.
Now for that part of the story: when the topic of source code releases came up, I initially stated that I probably would do that after version 1.0.0, in order to have a cleaned up source code version of the game. I did not want to get involved in coordinating a multi-programmer project, because ADOM is a spare time leisure and the sources changed often and to a vast extent. The topic was finished with that as far as I was concerned.
Again a few years later (about a year or two ago) there was a sudden influx of folks sporting the following attitude: "You must release the sources or you are amoral, a swine and a bastard. Then we will be allowed to do whatever we want with those sources, no matter wether you agree with us or not." I tried to discuss this with the folks involved but they were extremely unreasonably and continued to insult me (I still have their emails lying around somewhere).
Since I consider ADOM and its background to be my intellectucal property, I didn't want to see my vision tarnished. There are enough roguelike games out there to modify and alter (and with much more readable source code, e.g. Angband) so that I can't see a real need to release the ADOM sources (and especial no moral obligation if the idiots out there are determined to ignore my rights).
It's sad that the nice majority will suffer due to the rants of the brain-dead few out on the 'Net, but I'm really fed up with this topic and the attacks on my person due to my views on the ADOM sources.
Note BTW that the sources for JADE (the successor to ADOM, see http://www.adom.de for details) will be freely available as soon as there is a prototype that at least allows you to start the game and run around on a map. I'm really supportive of the open source idea, I just got burned with ADOM and can be very stubborn.
If you still feel that I'm taking advantage of the open source community I hereby ask you to email me at thomas@biskup.net because I don' t visit slashdot.org regularly.
Any spelling mistakes or other problems in this article should be attributed to my incomplete grasp of the english language (I'm a native German).
Slashdot Mirror
In my role as the creator and maintainer of the roguelike game ADOM I'd like to comment this (especially since this posting spawned an ugly thread on rec.games.roguelike.adom):
First of all I'm not taking advantage on the open source community at all. The sources of ADOM have been written from scratch and do not use any parts from other open source roguelike games (like Nethack or Angband). Anybody stating the contrary is lying in a blatant and annoying fashion.
It is also not true, that ADOM *originally* released with the caveat of releasing the sources for ADOM 1.0.0. When ADOM first got released, open source (or not) never was an important topic and initially I released ADOM to see if there was any interest in the game. Whether sources would be released or not became a topic after a year or two.
Now for that part of the story: when the topic of source code releases came up, I initially stated that I probably would do that after version 1.0.0, in order to have a cleaned up source code version of the game. I did not want to get involved in coordinating a multi-programmer project, because ADOM is a spare time leisure and the sources changed often and to a vast extent. The topic was finished with that as far as I was concerned.
Again a few years later (about a year or two ago) there was a sudden influx of folks sporting the following attitude: "You must release the sources or you are amoral, a swine and a bastard. Then we will be allowed to do whatever we want with those sources, no matter wether you agree with us or not." I tried to discuss this with the folks involved but they were extremely unreasonably and continued to insult me (I still have their emails lying around somewhere).
Since I consider ADOM and its background to be my intellectucal property, I didn't want to see my vision tarnished. There are enough roguelike games out there to modify and alter (and with much more readable source code, e.g. Angband) so that I can't see a real need to release the ADOM sources (and especial no moral obligation if the idiots out there are determined to ignore my rights).
It's sad that the nice majority will suffer due to the rants of the brain-dead few out on the 'Net, but I'm really fed up with this topic and the attacks on my person due to my views on the ADOM sources.
Note BTW that the sources for JADE (the successor to ADOM, see http://www.adom.de for details) will be freely available as soon as there is a prototype that at least allows you to start the game and run around on a map. I'm really supportive of the open source idea, I just got burned with ADOM and can be very stubborn.
If you still feel that I'm taking advantage of the open source community I hereby ask you to email me at thomas@biskup.net because I don' t visit slashdot.org regularly.
Any spelling mistakes or other problems in this article should be attributed to my incomplete grasp of the english language (I'm a native German).