Didnt know where this fit in so I posted this here in the general section - better readership it seems.
This regards this article on PlanetUnreal. The article discusses open sourcing - releasing a development teams source code to the public that they may see the "innards" of the game, or mod, they are playing.
I would like to know what you people, Sentry Studios people especially, think about this. Why not open source?
I tend to think that people want to protect "intellectual property" and all those nifty secrets or code that the team members may have conjured up themselves because "they" thought of it. It is argued that these algorithms and secrets should not be considered such because in programming you can only do so many things in so many ways. Chances are the idea you have thought of has already been thought of or will be thought of sooner or later due to the simple fact that the "your" idea is the best/fastest/easiest way to do it. But for the moment, your way is the best way and you want to keep it that way for as long as you can to gain the egde.
Besides that, a dev team will want to take credit for their idea, you dont want others to come poach it and claim credit - even if it is kinda selfish. Just about the worse thing that can happen to a dev team is to have their ideas "copied" by team b. This in itself is not too bad, but when team b creates a mod that does better, its gonna hurt. When team b, due to the success of their mod, claims the stolen idea was theirs, its gonna suck really bad. This is what I think of these intellectual property things and close sourcing.
I believe that open sourcing has advantages and disadvantages - i didnt really discuss this at length coz I havent really got my thoughts together yet. I would also like to know how people here think open and close sourcing would effect the dev team and community - not just the Sentries but others teams like those who make Firearms, Science & Industry, AUT, TacOps and SF. BTW please try not to do any biased comparisons, if any comparisons at all, while answering this post.
There is this post by 383Stroker which also relates to this thread. Would you give him the aiming system?
[This message was edited by I_ABuGa on Nov 07, 2000 at 08:40.]
This regards this article on PlanetUnreal. The article discusses open sourcing - releasing a development teams source code to the public that they may see the "innards" of the game, or mod, they are playing.
I would like to know what you people, Sentry Studios people especially, think about this. Why not open source?
I tend to think that people want to protect "intellectual property" and all those nifty secrets or code that the team members may have conjured up themselves because "they" thought of it. It is argued that these algorithms and secrets should not be considered such because in programming you can only do so many things in so many ways. Chances are the idea you have thought of has already been thought of or will be thought of sooner or later due to the simple fact that the "your" idea is the best/fastest/easiest way to do it. But for the moment, your way is the best way and you want to keep it that way for as long as you can to gain the egde.
Besides that, a dev team will want to take credit for their idea, you dont want others to come poach it and claim credit - even if it is kinda selfish. Just about the worse thing that can happen to a dev team is to have their ideas "copied" by team b. This in itself is not too bad, but when team b creates a mod that does better, its gonna hurt. When team b, due to the success of their mod, claims the stolen idea was theirs, its gonna suck really bad. This is what I think of these intellectual property things and close sourcing.
I believe that open sourcing has advantages and disadvantages - i didnt really discuss this at length coz I havent really got my thoughts together yet. I would also like to know how people here think open and close sourcing would effect the dev team and community - not just the Sentries but others teams like those who make Firearms, Science & Industry, AUT, TacOps and SF. BTW please try not to do any biased comparisons, if any comparisons at all, while answering this post.
There is this post by 383Stroker which also relates to this thread. Would you give him the aiming system?
[This message was edited by I_ABuGa on Nov 07, 2000 at 08:40.]