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

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Tom Plunket wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> So why waste their time even asking if they would consider
> aligning their goals with yours?  That seems like the ridiculous
> part- OF COURSE hobbyists are not going to want to take
> commercial concerns into account, THAT'S THE POINT.

Reminds me again of the joke about the 2 economists:

Two economists are walking down the street.  Near the gutter, a $20 bill
flutters.  One economist looks down, looks at the other, and exclaims, "Hey!
There's a $20 bill on the ground by the gutter!"  The second economist says,
"Nonsense, if there was someone would have picked it up already" and they
keep right on walking.

In other words, 6 months ago I had no reason to assume that hobbyist labor
would be completely useless to me.  I knew they wouldn't have the same
agendas as myself, but I thought they might have sufficient overlap to get
something of value to me accomplished.  I was mistaken.  Linux hobbyist game
developers of GPL flavor are of no use whatsoever to Windows commercial game
developers of BSD flavor, even if both are doing open source and might
benefit from common tools.  That may seem obvious to you, but it wasn't to
me, and I'd question why it should seem obvious to you at first glance.  I
looked at a *lot* of open source projects in the name of avoiding Not
Invented Here.  In hindsight, I should have gotten back to my own Ocean Mars
code a lot sooner.

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

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.