The GPL / BSD cultural divide (was ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python CANNED)

[Brandon J. Van Every]

"Bent C Dalager" <bcd at pvv.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:bu3iv2$n2u$4 at tyfon.itea.ntnu.no...
> In article <4004EC9E.1E2E2893 at alcyone.com>,
> Erik Max Francis  <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> >
> >If you're saying that you've come to the realization that volunteer
> >programers on a project with which you only have a passing interest
> >won't follow your orders and do whatever you say, I'd say pointing that
> >out is less like "denigration" and more like "common goddamn sense."
>
> It is, never the less, worth pointing out. It would seem that Brandon
> entered the scene with an idea that OSS developers might be incredibly
> useful to him for some reason or other. Other game developers might
> very well have the same idea. When Brandon finds out that this is not
> the case and describes in some detail why OSS won't do the job for
> him, than this can certainly be useful for other game developers to
> learn so that don't have to spend 6 months figuring out the exact same
> thing themselves.
>
> The conclusion may seem obvious to _you_ but this is no guarantee that
> everyone else also possesses this knowledge. OSS is being hailed as
> the second coming, and it comes as no surprise therefore that some
> people might be deluded into thinking they could harness this power to
> cure cancer overnight or land a man on Mars by 2005.

Agreed, and more specifically, there is a huge *cultural divide* between
most OSS developers and proprietary commercial developers who simply want to
add some OSS "to get the boring bits over with."  There are also huge
cultural divides between Linux and Windows developers, and again between
commercial game developers and hobbyist game developers.

These cultural divides are what make the vast majority of people useless to
my purposes, not some table waiter fetish as some other poster indicated.
The problem is, the OSS people are inevitably going to pursue *their* goals,
and there is not much overlap between their goals and *my* goals.  They
don't think about problems the same way, they don't work the same way, they
don't manage the same way, they don't ship to the same schedules, they don't
apply the same degree of seriousness to various endeavors... the list goes
on and on and on.  OSS people are doing "their thing," and it is not my
thing.  Even though, in the abstract, I'm perfectly willing to use BSD style
licenses as part of my ongoing development.

In fact, one can identify the locus of problems by simply asking, "How many
OSS game developers are willing to work on something with a BSD license?"
Precious few.  Most BSD licenses out there are not game software.  BSD is a
good indicator that someone cares about commercial concerns.

-- 
Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"Desperation is the motherfucker of Invention." - Robert Prestridge