Open Source Mods

[Synthos]

Anyone ever done any? Anyone plan to do any?
If the answer is no to either, why?

I think having open source mods with a GNU liscence say (and a vindictive community for plagerism) would be a great idea and would advance the quality of all mods quite a bit.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[The Dark Elf]

I think its a bad idea. the GNU licence is only good for those people in a position to follow it up with lawyers and court appearances, assuming they can even catch people who steal the work from them. Thing is, if your just Joe regular. Your gonna have an incredibly difficult time proving something was yours originally if you go make it open source, someone changes a few things then makes a profit claiming it was their own work. People like id can make Doom open source cause nobody on this planet could get away with claiming that code was their own.

So yeah bad idea. GNU is only good if you can afford to do something about it. Same goes for NDA's, lots of mod teams claim to have those but I would put money on none of them actually being able to follow them up with the law if someone was to break one.

 

[Synthos]

hopefully the community would be very vindictive of anyone who thought they could get away with plagerism

I just wish that there was more sharing in the mod community
we could build much better mods as a whole than seperated


EDIT:

I just thought of this...
What we could have is a community driven mod database, that would act as the front-end between mod creators and people wishing to use code from the mod...
That way, there would be one unified front for people to go to that need help, and hopefully the power to back the liscence agreements.

 

[The Dark Elf]

hopefully the community would be very vindictive of anyone who thought they could get away with plagerism

I just wish that there was more sharing in the mod community
we could build much better mods as a whole than seperated


EDIT:

I just thought of this...
What we could have is a community driven mod database, that would act as the front-end between mod creators and people wishing to use code from the mod...
That way, there would be one unified front for people to go to that need help, and hopefully the power to back the liscence agreements.

For something like that to have the financial backing to do so. It would have to be a paid for service.

 

[botman]

More Open Source MODs would be great. There have been a few in the past. One that immediately comes to mind is Open Source Jail Break...

http://www.planethalflife.com/features/motw/osjailbreak97.shtm

Doing a google.com search on "open source half-life mod" would probably find you a few others.

Open Source isn't so much about protecting your intellectual property as it is about sharing what you've done so that others can build upon it and also make it available to all.

botman

 

[dassbaba]

open source mods are a valiant idea but flawed

too lazy to explain it

good try, but the open source wars can be fought elsewhere

 

[Venmoch]

It depends, I may go the way in creating a load of "Mini Mods" that I'll release the sourcecode for but not a big release, thats just stupid

 

[Onions]

I find a caring and helpful community such as www.thewavelength.net (and all going well, here) to be a more valuable resource than open source mods.

 

[Glo-Boy]

Forgive my ignorance here, but what are GNUs? NDAs? What exactly would and "open source" mod be?

 

[Synthos]

thanks nietzsche, I've never been too sure on licenses, so I just threw GNU out there...