[ANNOUNCE] Umbra role-playing game 0.2 pre-alpha

[Chris Gonnerman]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kamikaze at kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Umbra role-playing game 0.2 pre-alpha

>   There are two reasons not to: the practical, and the philosophical.
>
>   The practical side is that people would have the urge to start
> fiddling with the source, and I *really* can't spare the time to even
> hear about their diffs, let alone use them, especially since I refactor
> mercilessly so the code base changes rapidly.  And they would start
> fiddling with the source, because the only people who are likely to run
> it at this point are Python programmers.

I won't be.  I don't even run the same version of Python on all my computers
(upgrading them all is a lot of work).  If I had source, yeah, I'd play with
it... probably find a few bugs.  If you don't want to deal with the diffs,
ignore them, but you may be ignoring real bug reports.  Refactoring doesn't
excise all the old code, after all, not to mention the old bugs.

(BTW why do people talk about refactoring like it's a new thing?  I've been
doing it for years, but didn't have a cool name for it...)

>   I'd rather hear high-level suggestions; "stories" in Extreme
> Programming terms.

>   The philosophical side is that it's my code.  Yes, I believe in code
> ownership.  If I *choose* to give people access to my source, then
> that's fine but if I choose not to, then that's also fine.

True.  No argument there.

> Now, when it
> gets to a stable, basically finished state, I do plan to release it as
> open source and start working on a multiplayer, server-side,
> browser-client version.  That's likely to be a year or so in the future,
> though.  Until then, it's going to be distributed as .pyo files (and I
> will take a very, VERY dim view of anyone decompiling them and
> distributing the source, as that is a copyright violation and I can and
> will take action; think how cranky I normally am, and then multipy that
> by a factor of 10).

Don't know you personally, so can't evaluate.  Compiled Python files are
inefficient, though, since the bytecode changes with each version.

>   That I even have to *state* that indicates that a certain group of
> people have really done a job of poisoning the well of software
> development.  I loathe and despise the communist types like St*llm*n who
> want to prevent anyone from owning their own software.  Don't go there.

I've been in this argument already once this week, so I won't visit it
again.  If Stallman is Communist, I must be a Socialist, but frankly I am
more like a Libertarian.

>   Not that I'm suggesting that you had that in mind, but those are the
> consequences of "just use source".

I'm not sure how it's a consequence.  Your copyright protects you exactly
as much with or without the source code.  Ignoring patches/diffs is about
as hard as ignoring spam (which I'm sure you do every day, just like me).

On the other hand, available source means possibly useful bug reports, more
meaningful feature suggestions, and less hassle from people with varying
Python versions.