The throuble is, where do you want to configure it? If you have no/etc/thisapp.conf you are already in deep throuble. The throuble is really that Linux or Unix in general doesn't provide much of a standard way to configure a binary, stucking stuff into/etc/ and crossing the fingers that you don't run into a version conflict with another version of the same software isn't exactly a clean solution.
So far there isn't even a standard way to locate the data that the binary needs, so most app still hardcode that./proc/self/exe might help here, since that tells you at least the location of your binary, however that is something that I found more or less by luck, not really sure if thats save to use for that purpose.
### I don't know why anyone would put system-wide configuration data anywhere else but in/etc. I mean,
Because you might want to have two different versions or two different instances of the same programm and don't want them to share the same config file. Everytime that happens you basically have two choices a) throw the binary away and recompile everything from source and b) use a hex-editor and fix the path to the config and the rest, both of course work, however neither of one that I would consider a 'good solution'.
Even so this is a aprils joke, LSB does NOT force you to use RPM for you distro, your distro can still use whatever you like and be it Linux-from-scratch, all that LSB requires that your distro provides some way to install LSB-conforming rpms in addition to what your distro already provdides. On Debian that means using alien to install the RPMs, nothing more.
As long as their isn't a finished and useable Open Source implementation Java stays a major pain to use on an Open Source OS. Sure, Suns marketing speach might make you believe its portable, but I never had so much throuble with getting software to run than I had with java programms.
Where is my complete ready to use OSS toolchain (level editor, modelviewer, modeler, etc) for CrystalSpace or for Quake2? Sure both are engines, both however are neither really up to date nor 'ready for work', at least not when you only count OSS tools. If you bringt non-free tools into the mix there are of course a bunch of things available to produce content for Quake games, however in the OSS world you are stuck with some half working export scripts at best.
From what I have seen so far OGRE might be the closest one for ready-to-use, since it seems to have a working blender exporter. However even that is realitivly low level. Something like Crystal Spaces Entity layer (CEL) might help here, however thats not ready for primetime as far as I know.
About Q3, nope, not yet GPL, however as soon as id finds time it will.
And just for the record, just because something calls itself engine it doesn't mean that its ready to create a fullblown game, in most cases you will run into a heapload of throuble with engines which had never more created with them than a bunch of 3d Tetris.
And lets not forget that they also created DeluxePaint, the state of the art paint programm in the early Amiga days and still superior to many todays programms when it comes to pixel-art.
### Actually, writing an OSS game engine isn't the problem
I have seen enough OSS games being in throuble due to the lack of coders to know that writing an OSS game engine IS the problem, at least part of it. Sure you also needs artists, but how many high quality OSS engine can you name, especially ready to use ones with a complete toolchain to create content? Coding a engine doesn't stop once you have a basic engine and a importer for Quake3 levels, you also need the tools to create the content and when it comes to 3d level editors I couldn't name a single OSS one, Blender might come closest, but thats it.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
### I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead
Its not dead, it just looks pretty dusty compared to Gimp2.2. CinePaint is after all a fork of Gimp1.0 and hasn't really worked much at all to keep up with newer version of Gtk, they seem to have concentrated more on the internal features that are needed.
The biggest problem with Cinepaint is really that FilmGimp and Gimp never merged back then when it would be doable. Its now a lost cause since both codebases drifted far away from each other. And until Gegl gets ready there is little chance to ever see some high color support in Gimp.
The development teams of Gtk and Gimp have split up long time ago, sure it still has the 'Gimp' in its name, but if something goes wrong in Gtk you can't blame the Gimp developers for it or visa verse.
If I am wrong and one of the Gimp developers messed up the open/saved dialogs, please feel free to correct me.
I fully agree with you, but just for the record, the open/save dialog is business of Gtk and less so of the Gimp, and the latest version of Gtk should, if rumor proves correct, improved the open/save quite a bit and added back some type-ahead support.
While I agree that it was pretty bad move to remove the only good feature of the old dialog that made it stand out of from all the others, it looks as they are slowly fixing that breakage caused by the new dialog up. Time will tell how that turns out, but so far I still have good hopes that the new dialog will sooner or later superseed the old one for both mouse and keyboard usage.
### I don't think it's really fair to criticise that aspect.
Well, that aspect is very real, if its due to Gimp being based on X11 or whatever, thats just a implementation detail that most users won't care about. The problem is still there and won't go away anytime soon, so I think its perfectly fair to critisise it.
The problem is that some free software people expect that the user will already be happy if they can just run the application on the their OS of choice, the throuble however is that most people at least want to have a minimum amount of integration into the way normal OS application behave, running free software through 'emulation-layers' like X11 or Cygwin just doesn't make free software look all that good on non-Unix OSs.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why would I use Gimp? Well, because there isn't much of an alternative on Linux, neither non-free or free. From the useability and feature point of view Gimp has enough problems that I wouldn't think to long to switch to a better alternative when it comes across, but so far its the best we have and its not that bad once you get used to it.
However since there are just two many things that Gimp won't address in the near future and since, unless I missed, something, there isn't another alternative on the horizon, I started my own, stil in its very very early baby steps:
### By that logic, FOX news should also be illegal.
Doesn't need to be illegal, neither need tabaco, alcohol or other drugs be made illegal, but its really not something that belongs into the hands of children. And well, in the case of FOX news probally not even in the hands of adults =;)
### Alcohol and tobacco are PHYSICALLY HARMFUL. You can die from alcohol and tobacco. You *cannot* die from abuse of video games... Explicit or otherwise.
Well, a video game won't poisen your lung or liver, that however doesn't mean that it can't fill your brain with shit.
### as real as video games are looking they are still not 100% on
Graphics are having a rapit progression, ten years ago you had little pixel-monsters, all die animations where the same and rather abstract. Today you have already more or less physically correctly behaving bodies, shoot them in the arm and they will have a bleading wound there, shoot them in the head and they will leave a trail of blood on the wall, bunch them down the stairs and they will fall down quite accuratly. In the next ten years we will have more and more progress, physic will get even more realistic and look less 'dolly', wounds will be more realistic so will blood. Not too long and we will have stuff that isn't differable from actual real violence.
People die while doings sports all the time, you seldomly see large marathons where not one or two people dropped dead. Should be now go and ban sports?
### There have been studies in universities which shows links between playing video games and being violent.
Aehm, well, there have been studies profing all kind of shit about videogames, "they make violent", "they make less violent", "they isolate you", "they don't"... pick five different studies and you get ten different answers. You will simply have a very hard time to prove any kind of direct connection between violence and video games when there are tons of other 'violent' influences on the kids (tv, media, war on other countries, stress with parents, etc).
The only study that I believe is right is one that basically said something along the line that video games help to train reflexes, however thats not much supprising, do something often and you will be getting better at it, no big suprise here. And just because you get better at moving the mouse to target little ugly sprites, doesn't mean you get better at shooting real people nor that it is more likly that you will going to shoot real people.
### Humans learn by watching, and do we really want young kids learning from video games?
Humans learn by watching, yes, but they don't simply repeat everything they see. Maybe that repeating-thing is true for a two year old, but beside from that brain will be a bit more clever on how to interpret what it has seen. Looking at violence can be discouraging or encouraging or simply don't matter at all, it completly depends on the person.
### To them I would say, check out the lower middle class where both parents work, and the kid has nothing but a tv set and playstation.
So what, the parents still have a whole bunch of control over their kids. They are the ones that provide the kids with money, they can control what stuff they buy with it. Sure, if the stores are now forced to not sell adult video games that is a good thing, since it puts more control back into the parents hand. "try and eliminate is the violence in video games" is however nothing more then asking for censor ship by the government and that is simply unacceptable.
### One thing that is a bit surprising and disappointing is that so many of these bugs are from well-known bad coding practices. Why the hell is *anyone* still using strcat in distributed software, for instance?
Because such functions are still in the libc and because C coding books still teach them. To get rid of such things one would simply need to either remove them completly from the library or at least let gcc output a big-fat warning on their use or only allow them when some pragma or gcc-flag is set. Having a better standard way to handle strings, such as libowfat's stralloc would of course also help.
As long as neither the libraries nor the compiler get it right and remove them, JoeProgrammer will continue to use the functions, be it by error, lack of knowledge or for portability reason.
The last time I looked at Firefox (month or two ago) it still couldn't continue download, neither can Internet Explorer or most other browsers. Wget on the other side is continuing my downloads since well back in something like 1998, probally even before that, why havn't the browsers still catched up after six years? I mean its not that difficult to implement and at least Firefox already keeps track of the past downloads, so continuing them would be pretty much trivial.
Another feature I miss is the ability to mass-download and print multiple webpages at once, ie. when you have a latex2html converted latex document with no.dvi/.ps/.pdf available (happens more often then one thinks) there is no way to get that completly downloaded and/or printed with todays browser or at least only with LOTS of manual clicking.
And yet another feature is the ability to browse directories, if there is a directory full of images I would like the browser to automatically generate me a thumbnail galery of those on demand, not just the boring default directory listing that is generated by the server.
As a sidenote, some of the above feature could only be relativly hackishly be implemented due to the lack of features in HTTP/HTML, which will provides little or no hints on what webpages belong together and doesn't as far as I know provide any way to browse directories. Link-feature that is present since HTML2 or so helps a bit, but since most browser have ignored that feature or are still ignoring it, its beside from some automatically generated webpages hardly used at all on the web.
I for one don't use my bookmarks much, I have a dozen webpages I regularly visit and thats the few bookmarks I use, for the rest its quicker to use my google-search in the toolbar and just type to where I want then to find in which submenu I stuck some bookmarks month ago. Beside from that I mainly use bookmarks simply as a little helper for the lack of a better searchable browsing history.
This is already possible in Galeon for ages, what I however miss is a way to customize the password settings for single input fields, ie. the Mailman password field for example isn't recognized by Galeon and thus no password is ever remembered, I would like to tell the browser explicitly that this is a field that I want him to remember. And there is also the throuble that the browser always remembers the password *before* the login is validated, so if you type the wrong one, you have quite a lot of throuble getting it out of the password manager again and fixing it. Idealy the browser should only save the password after a successfull login, however with most webpages that should get tricky, since there might no easy way to find out what was successfull and was what not.
Not only the bookmarks should be searchable, but also the pages they link too. I wish it would be possible to have full-text search across all webpages I ever visited, technically it shouldn't be much of a problem at all.
Beside from that full-text search across whole websites, not just single pages would also be extremly usefull (ie. reading/browsing a latex2html converted document).
I don't think that 'real' 3d will ever have any place in everyday userinterfaces, after all you don't want to search windows and files behind your back which you can't see, it just wouldn't make much sense from a usability point of view.
However what will hopefull find its way into everydays userinterfaces are zooming capabilities, like for example Apples Expose shows them in a very simple way. While not really true 3d in itself zooming provides some functionality that is simply not available in most of todays interfaces, ie. the ability to 'step back'. Apples Expose for example allows you to take a step back from your Desktop, all Window become zoomed out and all of a sudden you can reach them all with a single click, while before they where all stacked on top of each other. It gives you see feel of a huge screen on a small one. Its really a rather simple thing, but can enhanche usability a lot. In a filebrowser it might for example be possible to zoom into a thumbnail and then simply see the file and be able to edit it.
After all todays userinterfaces are still pretty much the same as what Apple gave us 20 years ago or even what Xerox Parc gave us 30 years ago (or whatever the correct timeframe is), nothing has really changed, technology however would now allow much more useable interface and there is still a lot of improvements to explore.
Re:A momentous occasion in the history of crap gam
on
BZFlag goes Platinum
·
· Score: 1
### "bad graphics" and "not fun" shouldn't be the same idea.
While that is true, its a rather bogus argument. Sure, graphics are not a replacment for fun, but a good game can only get better when the graphics, sound and music play along. There little excuse to let the whole presentation of a game down, just because gameplay is half done. Sure there is always a lack of man-power and artists, but with 1'000'000 downloads you for sure will find somebody if you just search a bit. Last not least, with better graphics we could also finally get rid of all those "Hey, gameplay is ok, so its ok that graphics suck", no wonder some people disagree with that.
I am quite sure that Tuxracer is not a Pen Pen clone. The major source of inspiration when I remember correctly was Nintendos 1080 snowboard game on N64, the Mario64 race-against-a-penguin levels might have been another source of inspiration. Actually I have never heard of Pen Pen before and I have read the Tuxracer mailing list in its very early days, so unless I missed something I doubt that Pen Pen played any role in the Tuxracer development.
### Once we get decent open source game engines, development environments, and media, the floodgates will open.
Don't get your hopes too high on the floodgate-theory, even the mod-scene, while it certainly produced some impressive stuff is in most part build out of little additions to existing engines and existing artwork, only very few mods actually manage to stend fully on its own with both gameplay and artwork.
The advantage of $$$ is that it can buy you a team of people working fulltime together on a project, without that you will only have a bunch of hobby programmers, most of them getting distracted by RL issues after a year or two. So chance that they will really be able to produce a game and not just a small modification are rather low.
Slashdot Mirror
The throuble is, where do you want to configure it? If you have no /etc/thisapp.conf you are already in deep throuble. The throuble is really that Linux or Unix in general doesn't provide much of a standard way to configure a binary, stucking stuff into /etc/ and crossing the fingers that you don't run into a version conflict with another version of the same software isn't exactly a clean solution.
/proc/self/exe might help here, since that tells you at least the location of your binary, however that is something that I found more or less by luck, not really sure if thats save to use for that purpose.
So far there isn't even a standard way to locate the data that the binary needs, so most app still hardcode that.
### I don't know why anyone would put system-wide configuration data anywhere else but in /etc. I mean,
Because you might want to have two different versions or two different instances of the same programm and don't want them to share the same config file. Everytime that happens you basically have two choices a) throw the binary away and recompile everything from source and b) use a hex-editor and fix the path to the config and the rest, both of course work, however neither of one that I would consider a 'good solution'.
Even so this is a aprils joke, LSB does NOT force you to use RPM for you distro, your distro can still use whatever you like and be it Linux-from-scratch, all that LSB requires that your distro provides some way to install LSB-conforming rpms in addition to what your distro already provdides. On Debian that means using alien to install the RPMs, nothing more.
# java
-bash: java: command not found
As long as their isn't a finished and useable Open Source implementation Java stays a major pain to use on an Open Source OS. Sure, Suns marketing speach might make you believe its portable, but I never had so much throuble with getting software to run than I had with java programms.
Where is my complete ready to use OSS toolchain (level editor, modelviewer, modeler, etc) for CrystalSpace or for Quake2? Sure both are engines, both however are neither really up to date nor 'ready for work', at least not when you only count OSS tools. If you bringt non-free tools into the mix there are of course a bunch of things available to produce content for Quake games, however in the OSS world you are stuck with some half working export scripts at best.
From what I have seen so far OGRE might be the closest one for ready-to-use, since it seems to have a working blender exporter. However even that is realitivly low level. Something like Crystal Spaces Entity layer (CEL) might help here, however thats not ready for primetime as far as I know.
About Q3, nope, not yet GPL, however as soon as id finds time it will.
And just for the record, just because something calls itself engine it doesn't mean that its ready to create a fullblown game, in most cases you will run into a heapload of throuble with engines which had never more created with them than a bunch of 3d Tetris.
And lets not forget that they also created DeluxePaint, the state of the art paint programm in the early Amiga days and still superior to many todays programms when it comes to pixel-art.
### Actually, writing an OSS game engine isn't the problem
I have seen enough OSS games being in throuble due to the lack of coders to know that writing an OSS game engine IS the problem, at least part of it. Sure you also needs artists, but how many high quality OSS engine can you name, especially ready to use ones with a complete toolchain to create content? Coding a engine doesn't stop once you have a basic engine and a importer for Quake3 levels, you also need the tools to create the content and when it comes to 3d level editors I couldn't name a single OSS one, Blender might come closest, but thats it.
### I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead
Its not dead, it just looks pretty dusty compared to Gimp2.2. CinePaint is after all a fork of Gimp1.0 and hasn't really worked much at all to keep up with newer version of Gtk, they seem to have concentrated more on the internal features that are needed.
The biggest problem with Cinepaint is really that FilmGimp and Gimp never merged back then when it would be doable. Its now a lost cause since both codebases drifted far away from each other. And until Gegl gets ready there is little chance to ever see some high color support in Gimp.
The development teams of Gtk and Gimp have split up long time ago, sure it still has the 'Gimp' in its name, but if something goes wrong in Gtk you can't blame the Gimp developers for it or visa verse.
If I am wrong and one of the Gimp developers messed up the open/saved dialogs, please feel free to correct me.
I fully agree with you, but just for the record, the open/save dialog is business of Gtk and less so of the Gimp, and the latest version of Gtk should, if rumor proves correct, improved the open/save quite a bit and added back some type-ahead support.
While I agree that it was pretty bad move to remove the only good feature of the old dialog that made it stand out of from all the others, it looks as they are slowly fixing that breakage caused by the new dialog up. Time will tell how that turns out, but so far I still have good hopes that the new dialog will sooner or later superseed the old one for both mouse and keyboard usage.
### I don't think it's really fair to criticise that aspect.
Well, that aspect is very real, if its due to Gimp being based on X11 or whatever, thats just a implementation detail that most users won't care about. The problem is still there and won't go away anytime soon, so I think its perfectly fair to critisise it.
The problem is that some free software people expect that the user will already be happy if they can just run the application on the their OS of choice, the throuble however is that most people at least want to have a minimum amount of integration into the way normal OS application behave, running free software through 'emulation-layers' like X11 or Cygwin just doesn't make free software look all that good on non-Unix OSs.
Why would I use Gimp? Well, because there isn't much of an alternative on Linux, neither non-free or free. From the useability and feature point of view Gimp has enough problems that I wouldn't think to long to switch to a better alternative when it comes across, but so far its the best we have and its not that bad once you get used to it.
However since there are just two many things that Gimp won't address in the near future and since, unless I missed, something, there isn't another alternative on the horizon, I started my own, stil in its very very early baby steps:
http://flexlay.berlios.de/
### By that logic, FOX news should also be illegal.
Doesn't need to be illegal, neither need tabaco, alcohol or other drugs be made illegal, but its really not something that belongs into the hands of children. And well, in the case of FOX news probally not even in the hands of adults =;)
### Alcohol and tobacco are PHYSICALLY HARMFUL. You can die from alcohol and tobacco. You *cannot* die from abuse of video games... Explicit or otherwise.
Well, a video game won't poisen your lung or liver, that however doesn't mean that it can't fill your brain with shit.
### as real as video games are looking they are still not 100% on
Graphics are having a rapit progression, ten years ago you had little pixel-monsters, all die animations where the same and rather abstract. Today you have already more or less physically correctly behaving bodies, shoot them in the arm and they will have a bleading wound there, shoot them in the head and they will leave a trail of blood on the wall, bunch them down the stairs and they will fall down quite accuratly. In the next ten years we will have more and more progress, physic will get even more realistic and look less 'dolly', wounds will be more realistic so will blood. Not too long and we will have stuff that isn't differable from actual real violence.
People die while doings sports all the time, you seldomly see large marathons where not one or two people dropped dead. Should be now go and ban sports?
### There have been studies in universities which shows links between playing video games and being violent.
Aehm, well, there have been studies profing all kind of shit about videogames, "they make violent", "they make less violent", "they isolate you", "they don't"... pick five different studies and you get ten different answers. You will simply have a very hard time to prove any kind of direct connection between violence and video games when there are tons of other 'violent' influences on the kids (tv, media, war on other countries, stress with parents, etc).
The only study that I believe is right is one that basically said something along the line that video games help to train reflexes, however thats not much supprising, do something often and you will be getting better at it, no big suprise here. And just because you get better at moving the mouse to target little ugly sprites, doesn't mean you get better at shooting real people nor that it is more likly that you will going to shoot real people.
### Humans learn by watching, and do we really want young kids learning from video games?
Humans learn by watching, yes, but they don't simply repeat everything they see. Maybe that repeating-thing is true for a two year old, but beside from that brain will be a bit more clever on how to interpret what it has seen. Looking at violence can be discouraging or encouraging or simply don't matter at all, it completly depends on the person.
### To them I would say, check out the lower middle class where both parents work, and the kid has nothing but a tv set and playstation.
So what, the parents still have a whole bunch of control over their kids. They are the ones that provide the kids with money, they can control what stuff they buy with it. Sure, if the stores are now forced to not sell adult video games that is a good thing, since it puts more control back into the parents hand. "try and eliminate is the violence in video games" is however nothing more then asking for censor ship by the government and that is simply unacceptable.
### One thing that is a bit surprising and disappointing is that so many of these bugs are from well-known bad coding practices. Why the hell is *anyone* still using strcat in distributed software, for instance?
Because such functions are still in the libc and because C coding books still teach them. To get rid of such things one would simply need to either remove them completly from the library or at least let gcc output a big-fat warning on their use or only allow them when some pragma or gcc-flag is set. Having a better standard way to handle strings, such as libowfat's stralloc would of course also help.
As long as neither the libraries nor the compiler get it right and remove them, JoeProgrammer will continue to use the functions, be it by error, lack of knowledge or for portability reason.
The last time I looked at Firefox (month or two ago) it still couldn't continue download, neither can Internet Explorer or most other browsers. Wget on the other side is continuing my downloads since well back in something like 1998, probally even before that, why havn't the browsers still catched up after six years? I mean its not that difficult to implement and at least Firefox already keeps track of the past downloads, so continuing them would be pretty much trivial.
.dvi/.ps/.pdf available (happens more often then one thinks) there is no way to get that completly downloaded and/or printed with todays browser or at least only with LOTS of manual clicking.
Another feature I miss is the ability to mass-download and print multiple webpages at once, ie. when you have a latex2html converted latex document with no
And yet another feature is the ability to browse directories, if there is a directory full of images I would like the browser to automatically generate me a thumbnail galery of those on demand, not just the boring default directory listing that is generated by the server.
As a sidenote, some of the above feature could only be relativly hackishly be implemented due to the lack of features in HTTP/HTML, which will provides little or no hints on what webpages belong together and doesn't as far as I know provide any way to browse directories. Link-feature that is present since HTML2 or so helps a bit, but since most browser have ignored that feature or are still ignoring it, its beside from some automatically generated webpages hardly used at all on the web.
I for one don't use my bookmarks much, I have a dozen webpages I regularly visit and thats the few bookmarks I use, for the rest its quicker to use my google-search in the toolbar and just type to where I want then to find in which submenu I stuck some bookmarks month ago. Beside from that I mainly use bookmarks simply as a little helper for the lack of a better searchable browsing history.
This is already possible in Galeon for ages, what I however miss is a way to customize the password settings for single input fields, ie. the Mailman password field for example isn't recognized by Galeon and thus no password is ever remembered, I would like to tell the browser explicitly that this is a field that I want him to remember. And there is also the throuble that the browser always remembers the password *before* the login is validated, so if you type the wrong one, you have quite a lot of throuble getting it out of the password manager again and fixing it. Idealy the browser should only save the password after a successfull login, however with most webpages that should get tricky, since there might no easy way to find out what was successfull and was what not.
Not only the bookmarks should be searchable, but also the pages they link too. I wish it would be possible to have full-text search across all webpages I ever visited, technically it shouldn't be much of a problem at all.
Beside from that full-text search across whole websites, not just single pages would also be extremly usefull (ie. reading/browsing a latex2html converted document).
I don't think that 'real' 3d will ever have any place in everyday userinterfaces, after all you don't want to search windows and files behind your back which you can't see, it just wouldn't make much sense from a usability point of view.
However what will hopefull find its way into everydays userinterfaces are zooming capabilities, like for example Apples Expose shows them in a very simple way. While not really true 3d in itself zooming provides some functionality that is simply not available in most of todays interfaces, ie. the ability to 'step back'. Apples Expose for example allows you to take a step back from your Desktop, all Window become zoomed out and all of a sudden you can reach them all with a single click, while before they where all stacked on top of each other. It gives you see feel of a huge screen on a small one. Its really a rather simple thing, but can enhanche usability a lot. In a filebrowser it might for example be possible to zoom into a thumbnail and then simply see the file and be able to edit it.
After all todays userinterfaces are still pretty much the same as what Apple gave us 20 years ago or even what Xerox Parc gave us 30 years ago (or whatever the correct timeframe is), nothing has really changed, technology however would now allow much more useable interface and there is still a lot of improvements to explore.
### "bad graphics" and "not fun" shouldn't be the same idea.
While that is true, its a rather bogus argument. Sure, graphics are not a replacment for fun, but a good game can only get better when the graphics, sound and music play along. There little excuse to let the whole presentation of a game down, just because gameplay is half done. Sure there is always a lack of man-power and artists, but with 1'000'000 downloads you for sure will find somebody if you just search a bit. Last not least, with better graphics we could also finally get rid of all those "Hey, gameplay is ok, so its ok that graphics suck", no wonder some people disagree with that.
I am quite sure that Tuxracer is not a Pen Pen clone. The major source of inspiration when I remember correctly was Nintendos 1080 snowboard game on N64, the Mario64 race-against-a-penguin levels might have been another source of inspiration. Actually I have never heard of Pen Pen before and I have read the Tuxracer mailing list in its very early days, so unless I missed something I doubt that Pen Pen played any role in the Tuxracer development.
### Once we get decent open source game engines, development environments, and media, the floodgates will open.
Don't get your hopes too high on the floodgate-theory, even the mod-scene, while it certainly produced some impressive stuff is in most part build out of little additions to existing engines and existing artwork, only very few mods actually manage to stend fully on its own with both gameplay and artwork.
The advantage of $$$ is that it can buy you a team of people working fulltime together on a project, without that you will only have a bunch of hobby programmers, most of them getting distracted by RL issues after a year or two. So chance that they will really be able to produce a game and not just a small modification are rather low.