Think about it. Remember the "walls"?. People sat around watching virtual families in the walls instead of thinking or reading books.
We already have a great deal of oppression towards some aspects of free thinking, what, with the Patriot Act and the hostile attitudes some Americans have developed over the past 4 years. Burning books can't be that far off at this rate. Thinking just has to be labelled as terrorism essentially. That could be the road we're headed down.
Now, we're going to help this process along by giving people yet another way to waste their time instead of paying attention to the real world and real events going on around them. Even worse, Ray Bradbury almost prophesized this in a way. All we need now is "Surround-Vision" to go with our surround sound. Put 4 LCD projectors or flat panels on each wall, and watch EA's show 24/7 and you've got the same thing as Fahrenheit 451 predicted years ago.
While some valid points are made, there is a serious lack of insight into the open source world and how gaming could benefit.
The article treats game development as custom application specific development of code and media with a short product lifecycle and no reusability. That is how it is today, but Open Source could change that.
While the realm of game development has been out of reach of a single geeky individual since the "Insert favorite 6502 processor based console here" days, open source holds the key to bringing it back. The process has already begun. See: www.ogre3d.org irrlicht.sf.net
Note that these are engines for the advanced graphical portion of game development. There are many other open source libraries that will help with the audio, input, etc..
The key to open source game development is that the tools for developing quality games more rapidly and easier than ever before remain open source and free. Eventually new generations of tools will be built on the backs of the current generations, until we have open source tools for much easier 3D modelling and importing of scenes, audio, etc.. seamlessly. Of course you wouldn't apply open source ideas to a single application specific piece of code for a single game and expect to conquer the world with that. However, encapsulating all the state of the art and all the knowledge of current day game developers into easy to use tools following the open source model could VERY WELL be the way to go. The key to all this is for everyone to keep their ego out of it, and integrate existing open source tools together to create better ones, rather than having everyone go off and create 1000 nearly identical 3D engines.
Open source development of a specific game is NOT a good idea given the current state of the art. I will give the article that. However, open source development of platforms and tools on which to develop games more easily in the future may have some merit.
Finally - my ideas to this point have been primarily rooted in the code rather than the media and artistry needed to create a game. Until tools have gotten to the point than anyone can model 3D objects interactively as easily as playing with play-dough in real life, it will require an artist. What we need is open source artistry in conjunction with open source game programming. Why couldn't artists develop models and music and place it out there for open source game developers to use freely. Then a non-artist developer can just find their favorite open source media to throw into their game. As the tools get better, the artistry becomes easier, and eventually all will converge. At that point - artists will really be willing to give their stuff away free since it doesn't take that long anymore.
PCs, Disk Drives, DVD/CD burners, could all be construed as "inducive" to copyright infringement.
Developers of Operating Systems, open source, or not, would be required to spend money and resources to avoid "inducing" copyright. Do you go after the people who wrote the compilers also, since they're used to write the code that is used to induce the copyright? What about the contractors who set up a production line for a DVD burner that was used for copyright infringement?
Where does the buck stop with this? If you give someone a baseball bat as a gift, and they use it to beat down your neighbor, does that make you a criminal? Should you be prohibited from distributing baseball bats? This logic is insane!
If this is passed, I would get out of this country, or at least get some gold or foreign currency. Our economy will collapse in a matter of months. No one has the resources to reverse engineer this functionality into existing product lines.
This will just drive the technology sector into bankruptcy and its resources will go to the entertainment industry. When all is said and done, the entertainment moguls will probably turn the tables and buy out the techs. Instead of "AOL - Time Warner", we'll have "Viacom - Dell - Comcast". There will be no jobs for millions of tech oriented college graduates, and they will not spend money on overpriced DRM enabled media if they don't have jobs. It's like an economic virus - once it consumes its host, there is nothing left to thrive on. Unfortunately its host is anything and everything in our economy that is even remotely involved with "entertainment".
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Think about it. Remember the "walls"?. People sat around watching virtual families in the walls instead of thinking or reading books.
We already have a great deal of oppression towards some aspects of free thinking, what, with the Patriot Act and the hostile attitudes some Americans have developed over the past 4 years. Burning books can't be that far off at this rate. Thinking just has to be labelled as terrorism essentially. That could be the road we're headed down.
Now, we're going to help this process along by giving people yet another way to waste their time instead of paying attention to the real world and real events going on around them. Even worse, Ray Bradbury almost prophesized this in a way. All we need now is "Surround-Vision" to go with our surround sound. Put 4 LCD projectors or flat panels on each wall, and watch EA's show 24/7 and you've got the same thing as Fahrenheit 451 predicted years ago.
While some valid points are made, there is a serious lack of insight into the open source world and how gaming could benefit.
The article treats game development as custom application specific development of code and media with a short product lifecycle and no reusability. That is how it is today, but Open Source could change that.
While the realm of game development has been out of reach of a single geeky individual since the "Insert favorite 6502 processor based console here" days, open source holds the key to bringing it back. The process has already begun. See:
www.ogre3d.org
irrlicht.sf.net
Note that these are engines for the advanced graphical portion of game development. There are many other open source libraries that will help with the audio, input, etc..
The key to open source game development is that the tools for developing quality games more rapidly and easier than ever before remain open source and free. Eventually new generations of tools will be built on the backs of the current generations, until we have open source tools for much easier 3D modelling and importing of scenes, audio, etc.. seamlessly. Of course you wouldn't apply open source ideas to a single application specific piece of code for a single game and expect to conquer the world with that. However, encapsulating all the state of the art and all the knowledge of current day game developers into easy to use tools following the open source model could VERY WELL be the way to go. The key to all this is for everyone to keep their ego out of it, and integrate existing open source tools together to create better ones, rather than having everyone go off and create 1000 nearly identical 3D engines.
Open source development of a specific game is NOT a good idea given the current state of the art. I will give the article that. However, open source development of platforms and tools on which to develop games more easily in the future may have some merit.
Finally - my ideas to this point have been primarily rooted in the code rather than the media and artistry needed to create a game. Until tools have gotten to the point than anyone can model 3D objects interactively as easily as playing with play-dough in real life, it will require an artist. What we need is open source artistry in conjunction with open source game programming. Why couldn't artists develop models and music and place it out there for open source game developers to use freely. Then a non-artist developer can just find their favorite open source media to throw into their game. As the tools get better, the artistry becomes easier, and eventually all will converge. At that point - artists will really be willing to give their stuff away free since it doesn't take that long anymore.
PCs, Disk Drives, DVD/CD burners, could all be construed as "inducive" to copyright infringement.
Developers of Operating Systems, open source, or not, would be required to spend money and resources to avoid "inducing" copyright. Do you go after the people who wrote the compilers also, since they're used to write the code that is used to induce the copyright? What about the contractors who set up a production line for a DVD burner that was used for copyright infringement?
Where does the buck stop with this? If you give someone a baseball bat as a gift, and they use it to beat down your neighbor, does that make you a criminal? Should you be prohibited from distributing baseball bats? This logic is insane!
If this is passed, I would get out of this country, or at least get some gold or foreign currency. Our economy will collapse in a matter of months. No one has the resources to reverse engineer this functionality into existing product lines.
This will just drive the technology sector into bankruptcy and its resources will go to the entertainment industry. When all is said and done, the entertainment moguls will probably turn the tables and buy out the techs. Instead of "AOL - Time Warner", we'll have "Viacom - Dell - Comcast". There will be no jobs for millions of tech oriented college graduates, and they will not spend money on overpriced DRM enabled media if they don't have jobs. It's like an economic virus - once it consumes its host, there is nothing left to thrive on. Unfortunately its host is anything and everything in our economy that is even remotely involved with "entertainment".