Let's close some corporate tax loopholes, pull out of our foreign wars, stop giving tax credits to companies that outsource, make some common sense spending cuts, tax capital gains as income, and raise taxes on the wealthy by 5 to 10 percent!
That sounded suspect, so I thought I'd take a quick look at some real numbers, which probably aren't of interest to you, but should be seen by other people so they don't take your statement at face value.
The combined income of everyone in America is roughly 13 trillion dollars (http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm)
This year's projected deficit is about $850 billion (http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/12/3230392/growth-in-us-budget-deficit-slows.html)
The top 10% of earners account for about 22% of the total income (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html), or just under 3 trillion dollars per year.
A 100% tax on their income would close the deficit twice over, even if no spending cuts were made, and that's assuming that they're already paying the maximum marginal tax rate of 39 percent (hint: many extremely wealthy people are making money from capital gains, and are taxed at 15% on that income).
> The alternative to this proposition? "If the government does it, it's not illegal." How 21st century.:-)
That's reading an awful lot into what I said. It's completely possible for a government to make laws and then break them itself -- the fact that they're breaking their own laws doesn't make it right. In fact, it makes the government dysfunctional.
While it's possible to have a government without Rule of Law, it's not possible to have Rule of Law without a government. Laws are just a concept. Without some sort of enforcement, they're meaningless.
> There is no legal basis for the existence of US government.
Governments exist to make and enforce laws, not because of laws. Regardless of your feelings about the legitimacy of a government, in absence of a government there are no laws to speak of, so it doesn't make any sense to say that a government requires a legal basis to exist.
Perhaps you meant that there's no ethical or philosophical basis for the existence of the US government, but even then, republics are set up so that you can replace the people in the government without armed revolution. If you can't build enough support for an electoral majority, then you're just a bunch of annoying anarchists trying to impose your will on a large group of people who don't want it. Call the government tyranny of the majority if you want, but overthrowing a democratically elected government is tyranny of the minority, which is even worse.
I think a lot of libertarians consider themselves to be the "true scotsmen" of the right wing. Theoretically they're to the right on economic issues and to the left on social issues, and I know a lot of libertarians who are like that. There are also plenty of republicans and some democrats who like to *call* themselves libertarian in order to sound cool, but really aren't.
If you treat your programmers like cookie cutter programmers, the ones who are better than that will go out and find better jobs, and you'll end up with cookie cutter programmers. It's like measuring productivity in terms of lines of code written. You may end up with working software, but you'll end up paying through the nose for a team of 10 crappy programmers to do something in six months that a single good programmer could have accomplished in one.
It doesn't help, when people pretend they don't understand the issue. Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL, usually there's no other way to do it if the piece of GPL software has more than one copyright holder, and even if there's just one copyright holder, getting a permission to use it with different license would be hours and hours of hassle, especially if copyright holder lives in a different country. Generally this makes the GPL code unusable, unless you can make your own code GPL too, and that's it. Now it's of course 100% fine, if the developer of the GPL code really wants this, if he really wants to make his code unusable unless the user is willing and able to make their code GPL too. But saying this is not restrictive is just patently false.
I understand the issue just fine. You see a piece of code you want to use, but it's under the GPL, which you don't like the terms of, which makes you angry. Yet, if the code were proprietary and you couldn't see it at all, you'd be totally okay with it, even thought you can't use the code in either case. What I don't understand is the thought process that somehow this makes GPLed code worse than proprietary code.
Next time you run into some GPL code and you get pissed off that you can't use it, think of the heaps and heaps of proprietary code that you're not allowed to use either and ask yourself why you're okay with that when you're not okay with the GPL.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of a developer, and my point stands. Unless you have a problem with proprietary software, I don't see how you can have a problem with the GPL. Do you get mad at Microsoft for the fact that their code exists and they're not letting you use it at all?
If the GPL doesn't suit you, don't use GPLed code. Not wanting to use GPLed code in your projects because you don't want to release your projects under the GPL doesn't have to translate to resenting the existence of the GPL.
I'll never understand this argument. You want people to write code that anyone can use and strip away the users rights (that is, take the code, change it, and make it proprietary, so people can't even see the new code, let alone make modifications to it, yet you don't want people to write code that people who modify it and redistribute it have to give back.
If it helps, why not use GPLed code the same way you'd use proprietary software. That is, download it, use it, and pretend that you don't have the right to distribute it at all.
My point is this: If you're okay with a license that's permissive enough to allow people to use it to make proprietary software, then you're probably also fine with proprietary software. If that's the case, what's your problem with a license that gives you more rights than proprietary software? It doesn't make any sense.
The author didn't say anything about sophisticated code, they said that C isn't a particularly sophisticated language. And it's not. C doesn't have very many bells and whistles -- it's just a very good, general-purpose language. The fact that the language itself is unsophisticated is what makes it good for writing the kind of code people write in C.
Secondly, C is not an object oriented language. I can write object oriented code in assembly language if I want, but that doesn't make assembly language object oriented.
3D models are difficult to deal with. For some reason 3D art in general tends to have a lot of sticky licensing problems. This is partly because the most popular texture archive on the internet has a license that prevents redistribution of their textures. As such, a lot of models people would otherwise want to upload aren't acceptable in free and open source games, so we can't accept them on OGA.
We've started our own texture archive as a way to hopefully deal with this in the long term, but it's going to take some time.
The other problem is that 3D art costs vastly more to make than 2D art. We commission a lot of 2D stuff, but we just don't have the budget for any worthwhile 3D commissions.
Just to be absolutely clear about this: Any art that is found to be submitted in violation of copyright will be immediately disqualified. We want to add a body of art to the commons so people don't have to rip art from other places.:)
That said, you'll probably need to "post process" it in a pixel editor to make it consistent with the art theme (since art entries are being judged on consistency, among other things).
Funny, they don't force the artists to use GIMP over tools they are familiar with. Sometimes people just like using a game competition as an excuse to make a game and not as a platform for some idealogical political crap. Why else would so many people enter into game jams where there aren't even winners?
As has been stated earlier, it is perfectly fine if your game runs on any of those proprietary platforms listed. It just needs to also run on a free-as-in-freedom platform, since that's the point of the contest. To be clear, it's not about restricting developers, it's about not restricting users. If your game requires a proprietary toolkit such as XNA, you've limited yourself to people who have purchased Windows. If you build your game out of free libraries, as long as you do it correctly, it will run very happily on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.
Can we also assume that the judges are savvy enough to compile and install my game on Linux (and it's dependencies)?
The rules address this question:
Ease of use: Your game should be easy to compile and run. You won't be disqualified automatically if a judge is unable to run your game, but it will count against you. You are advised to avoid having large numbers of obscure dependencies or requiring bleeding edge (unstable) libraries.
I think it's pretty clear from that that the judges are willing to compile your game in order to run it, but would appreciate if you stick to relatively common libraries and make sure compilation is a smooth process.
Can I require them to have working OpenGL even if that means they need to install scary proprietary GL drivers?
Your tone here is unnecessarily rude. For the record, there are non-proprietary OpenGL drivers that work just fine, so you don't need to worry about OpenGL support.
The way these GPL people push their ideals really tick me off sometimes. I've sort of jokingly thought that I should change my open source projects from a BSD license to a modified one that doesn't allow static linking with GPL libraries. Seems fair right? Why shouldn't I also punish developers for using restrictive licenses (such as the GPL).
In the grand scheme of things, allowing contest entries to use any other license (even CC0) in addition to the GPL is a pretty poor way of "pushing" the GPL on people, don't you think? We're requiring it for licensing consistency, because it provides a level of freedom that we deem necessary for the contest. If you wish to grant your users additional freedoms by releasing your code under other licenses in addition to the GPL, that's completely fine.
Just want to set the record straight on a couple of things:
The FSF considers art to be non-functional data that does not trigger the GPL's linking requirement:
Data that has an aesthetic purpose, rather than a functional one, may be included in a free system distribution as long as its license gives you permission to copy and redistribute, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes. For example, there are some game engines that have been released under the GNU GPL, and have accompanying game information—a world map, game graphics, and so on—released under such a verbatim distribution license. This kind of data can be part of a free system distribution.
Secondly, the art will be dual licensed as CC-BY-SA, so even if you happen to not like the GPL, you need not use the art under that license. Also, while the contest requires your art to be CC-BY-SA and GPL for the sake of consistency, you are also entirely free to license it under a less restrictive license as well.
Finally, your assertion that the game has to run only on a 100% free platform is false. Your game can run on any platforms you want it to. It's just that those platforms must include a 100% free platform.
We don't want to restrict what you do with your code and art. However, we do have a set of standards for entry -- as long as those standards are met, you can do anything you want with your work.
I'll be honest. I agree with this guy and I most certainly do not have aspergers.:)
High school level English consists of reading dull books and then writing character analyses and other crap about them. Unfortunately, at least in my experiences, being able to analyze characters and plots wasn't a skill that I gleaned by suffering through 1800's romance novels, it was a skill that I learned from writing fiction on my own. I started out very bad at writing, as most people do, because in all the time they spend forcing "classics" down your throat, they never teach you to write -- they just expect you to. (Sure, they teach you grammar and syntax and how to structure a paper, but they don't teach you a damn thing about how to write fiction, which is ironic since English classes focus on it so heavily.)
Interestingly, if I went back and took those classes now (with a mind for the teacher as my audience) I'd be an A student, but not because of anything I learned in English classes.
He's just not mincing words. It's time we started calling lies what they are. You're ignoring his facts because they're inconvenient for you and blaming your willful ignorance on the fact that he's calling a liar a liar. If you have a problem with that, prove him wrong. Otherwise, you're just lying about your motivations for not wanting to consider his argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got an even better idea!
Let's close some corporate tax loopholes, pull out of our foreign wars, stop giving tax credits to companies that outsource, make some common sense spending cuts, tax capital gains as income, and raise taxes on the wealthy by 5 to 10 percent!
That sounded suspect, so I thought I'd take a quick look at some real numbers, which probably aren't of interest to you, but should be seen by other people so they don't take your statement at face value.
A 100% tax on their income would close the deficit twice over, even if no spending cuts were made, and that's assuming that they're already paying the maximum marginal tax rate of 39 percent (hint: many extremely wealthy people are making money from capital gains, and are taxed at 15% on that income).
Your statement is demonstrably false.
And raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires.
> The alternative to this proposition? "If the government does it, it's not illegal." How 21st century. :-)
That's reading an awful lot into what I said. It's completely possible for a government to make laws and then break them itself -- the fact that they're breaking their own laws doesn't make it right. In fact, it makes the government dysfunctional.
While it's possible to have a government without Rule of Law, it's not possible to have Rule of Law without a government. Laws are just a concept. Without some sort of enforcement, they're meaningless.
I was with you until you went Full Retard:
> There is no legal basis for the existence of US government.
Governments exist to make and enforce laws, not because of laws. Regardless of your feelings about the legitimacy of a government, in absence of a government there are no laws to speak of, so it doesn't make any sense to say that a government requires a legal basis to exist.
Perhaps you meant that there's no ethical or philosophical basis for the existence of the US government, but even then, republics are set up so that you can replace the people in the government without armed revolution. If you can't build enough support for an electoral majority, then you're just a bunch of annoying anarchists trying to impose your will on a large group of people who don't want it. Call the government tyranny of the majority if you want, but overthrowing a democratically elected government is tyranny of the minority, which is even worse.
I think a lot of libertarians consider themselves to be the "true scotsmen" of the right wing. Theoretically they're to the right on economic issues and to the left on social issues, and I know a lot of libertarians who are like that. There are also plenty of republicans and some democrats who like to *call* themselves libertarian in order to sound cool, but really aren't.
If you treat your programmers like cookie cutter programmers, the ones who are better than that will go out and find better jobs, and you'll end up with cookie cutter programmers. It's like measuring productivity in terms of lines of code written. You may end up with working software, but you'll end up paying through the nose for a team of 10 crappy programmers to do something in six months that a single good programmer could have accomplished in one.
There's truth in what you say, but the GOP already has wiki of their own, with all sorts of misinformation.
It doesn't help, when people pretend they don't understand the issue. Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL, usually there's no other way to do it if the piece of GPL software has more than one copyright holder, and even if there's just one copyright holder, getting a permission to use it with different license would be hours and hours of hassle, especially if copyright holder lives in a different country. Generally this makes the GPL code unusable, unless you can make your own code GPL too, and that's it. Now it's of course 100% fine, if the developer of the GPL code really wants this, if he really wants to make his code unusable unless the user is willing and able to make their code GPL too. But saying this is not restrictive is just patently false.
I understand the issue just fine. You see a piece of code you want to use, but it's under the GPL, which you don't like the terms of, which makes you angry. Yet, if the code were proprietary and you couldn't see it at all, you'd be totally okay with it, even thought you can't use the code in either case. What I don't understand is the thought process that somehow this makes GPLed code worse than proprietary code.
Next time you run into some GPL code and you get pissed off that you can't use it, think of the heaps and heaps of proprietary code that you're not allowed to use either and ask yourself why you're okay with that when you're not okay with the GPL.
I don't know what you mean by "pat ant in fringe meant." Would you like to search the web for 'picture of a stallion'?
I'm looking at it from the perspective of a developer, and my point stands. Unless you have a problem with proprietary software, I don't see how you can have a problem with the GPL. Do you get mad at Microsoft for the fact that their code exists and they're not letting you use it at all?
If the GPL doesn't suit you, don't use GPLed code. Not wanting to use GPLed code in your projects because you don't want to release your projects under the GPL doesn't have to translate to resenting the existence of the GPL.
GPL is too restrictive.
I'll never understand this argument. You want people to write code that anyone can use and strip away the users rights (that is, take the code, change it, and make it proprietary, so people can't even see the new code, let alone make modifications to it, yet you don't want people to write code that people who modify it and redistribute it have to give back.
If it helps, why not use GPLed code the same way you'd use proprietary software. That is, download it, use it, and pretend that you don't have the right to distribute it at all.
My point is this: If you're okay with a license that's permissive enough to allow people to use it to make proprietary software, then you're probably also fine with proprietary software. If that's the case, what's your problem with a license that gives you more rights than proprietary software? It doesn't make any sense.
Seriously. Who would have ever thought to make a rectangualr tablet with rounded corners? It's not at all obvious, and there's certainly no prior art.
Is this a touchy subject for you, AC?
The author didn't say anything about sophisticated code, they said that C isn't a particularly sophisticated language. And it's not. C doesn't have very many bells and whistles -- it's just a very good, general-purpose language. The fact that the language itself is unsophisticated is what makes it good for writing the kind of code people write in C.
Secondly, C is not an object oriented language. I can write object oriented code in assembly language if I want, but that doesn't make assembly language object oriented.
...computer security experts flee Japan.
Deliberately creating and circulating misniformation seems like an unethical use of my tax money, much like propaganda campaigns.
OGA founder here.
3D models are difficult to deal with. For some reason 3D art in general tends to have a lot of sticky licensing problems. This is partly because the most popular texture archive on the internet has a license that prevents redistribution of their textures. As such, a lot of models people would otherwise want to upload aren't acceptable in free and open source games, so we can't accept them on OGA.
We've started our own texture archive as a way to hopefully deal with this in the long term, but it's going to take some time.
The other problem is that 3D art costs vastly more to make than 2D art. We commission a lot of 2D stuff, but we just don't have the budget for any worthwhile 3D commissions.
Bart
Just to be absolutely clear about this: Any art that is found to be submitted in violation of copyright will be immediately disqualified. We want to add a body of art to the commons so people don't have to rip art from other places. :)
Nothing at all, really. :)
That said, you'll probably need to "post process" it in a pixel editor to make it consistent with the art theme (since art entries are being judged on consistency, among other things).
Funny, they don't force the artists to use GIMP over tools they are familiar with. Sometimes people just like using a game competition as an excuse to make a game and not as a platform for some idealogical political crap. Why else would so many people enter into game jams where there aren't even winners?
As has been stated earlier, it is perfectly fine if your game runs on any of those proprietary platforms listed. It just needs to also run on a free-as-in-freedom platform, since that's the point of the contest. To be clear, it's not about restricting developers, it's about not restricting users. If your game requires a proprietary toolkit such as XNA, you've limited yourself to people who have purchased Windows. If you build your game out of free libraries, as long as you do it correctly, it will run very happily on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.
Can we also assume that the judges are savvy enough to compile and install my game on Linux (and it's dependencies)?
The rules address this question:
Ease of use: Your game should be easy to compile and run. You won't be disqualified automatically if a judge is unable to run your game, but it will count against you. You are advised to avoid having large numbers of obscure dependencies or requiring bleeding edge (unstable) libraries.
I think it's pretty clear from that that the judges are willing to compile your game in order to run it, but would appreciate if you stick to relatively common libraries and make sure compilation is a smooth process.
Can I require them to have working OpenGL even if that means they need to install scary proprietary GL drivers?
Your tone here is unnecessarily rude. For the record, there are non-proprietary OpenGL drivers that work just fine, so you don't need to worry about OpenGL support.
The way these GPL people push their ideals really tick me off sometimes. I've sort of jokingly thought that I should change my open source projects from a BSD license to a modified one that doesn't allow static linking with GPL libraries. Seems fair right? Why shouldn't I also punish developers for using restrictive licenses (such as the GPL).
In the grand scheme of things, allowing contest entries to use any other license (even CC0) in addition to the GPL is a pretty poor way of "pushing" the GPL on people, don't you think? We're requiring it for licensing consistency, because it provides a level of freedom that we deem necessary for the contest. If you wish to grant your users additional freedoms by releasing your code under other licenses in addition to the GPL, that's completely fine.
If this goes over well, we're discussing moving in different directions next year (and that may very well include 3D).
In the meantime, I'll plug a similar contest that might interest you on behalf of a friend of mine, that's going on right now. :)
http://tempestintheaether.org/index.php/news/133-open-tempest-3d
Just want to set the record straight on a couple of things:
The FSF considers art to be non-functional data that does not trigger the GPL's linking requirement:
Data that has an aesthetic purpose, rather than a functional one, may be included in a free system distribution as long as its license gives you permission to copy and redistribute, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes. For example, there are some game engines that have been released under the GNU GPL, and have accompanying game information—a world map, game graphics, and so on—released under such a verbatim distribution license. This kind of data can be part of a free system distribution.
Source: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
Secondly, the art will be dual licensed as CC-BY-SA, so even if you happen to not like the GPL, you need not use the art under that license. Also, while the contest requires your art to be CC-BY-SA and GPL for the sake of consistency, you are also entirely free to license it under a less restrictive license as well.
Finally, your assertion that the game has to run only on a 100% free platform is false. Your game can run on any platforms you want it to. It's just that those platforms must include a 100% free platform.
We don't want to restrict what you do with your code and art. However, we do have a set of standards for entry -- as long as those standards are met, you can do anything you want with your work.
I'll be honest. I agree with this guy and I most certainly do not have aspergers. :)
High school level English consists of reading dull books and then writing character analyses and other crap about them. Unfortunately, at least in my experiences, being able to analyze characters and plots wasn't a skill that I gleaned by suffering through 1800's romance novels, it was a skill that I learned from writing fiction on my own. I started out very bad at writing, as most people do, because in all the time they spend forcing "classics" down your throat, they never teach you to write -- they just expect you to. (Sure, they teach you grammar and syntax and how to structure a paper, but they don't teach you a damn thing about how to write fiction, which is ironic since English classes focus on it so heavily.)
Interestingly, if I went back and took those classes now (with a mind for the teacher as my audience) I'd be an A student, but not because of anything I learned in English classes.
He's just not mincing words. It's time we started calling lies what they are. You're ignoring his facts because they're inconvenient for you and blaming your willful ignorance on the fact that he's calling a liar a liar. If you have a problem with that, prove him wrong. Otherwise, you're just lying about your motivations for not wanting to consider his argument.
This is a perfect solution to when you download a movie and the aspect ratio is wrong. :)