Author Topic: Argument with Mom: Open Source & Free / Private Servers  (Read 13157 times)

Warrior

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Argument with Mom: Open Source & Free / Private Servers
« Reply #30 on: July 11, 2007, 05:43:05 am »
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I don't suppose someone working on Tremulous for years is trying to spead his programming knowledge
Heh... I was not really clear on this... I meant that some good programmer can be better recognized by others due to his programming abilities. In this way, it can help that programmer to join some proprietary company (profitable company) later.

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But we still have our excellent browser do we?
FF is very good, but there are betters (e.g. Opera)... Well, FF CSS support is as capable as the Opera one... at least nowadays... Opera is promising a new stunning version soon, which will beat any other browser...
(I'm almost going off topic, so I'll stop here)

(Btw, why is a non-programmer talking about programmers?)

PS.: tjw and Timbo also works on ioQuake3, and Norfenstein worked on some few other games (I think in some non-free games too)...

/dev/humancontroller

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Argument with Mom: Open Source & Free / Private Servers
« Reply #31 on: July 11, 2007, 08:58:36 am »
Quote from: "Warrior"
Quote
I don't suppose someone working on Tremulous for years is trying to spead his programming knowledge
Heh... I was not really clear on this... I meant that some good programmer can be better recognized by others due to his programming abilities. In this way, it can help that programmer to join some proprietary company (profitable company) later.
Yeah I get better recognition from my friends too, because: Haha I made my own aimbot, you did not!

Quote from: "Warrior"
(Btw, why is a non-programmer talking about programmers?)
Who do you mean?

Oblivion

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Argument with Mom: Open Source & Free / Private Servers
« Reply #32 on: July 11, 2007, 02:20:22 pm »
Quote from: "Seffylight"
It's "free" in two senses of the word.

It's free in that it requires no money from the end-user to download and play, and the developers don't make any money off of the game (aside from whatever donations they may get).

It is also free as in "freedom". Liberty.
Quote from: "Wikipedia"
Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with certain restrictions to ensure that end users have the same freedoms as the original authors.

To make software available as free software, the software has to be accompanied by a software licence saying that the copyright holder allows these acts (a free software licence), or be in the public domain, and the human readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available.


Yes, someone may be making money off of providing servers for the game to run on, and yes, the developers might be getting a few donations here and there, but the bottom line is that no one is directly making money off of Tremulous. It's also free. Open-source. It got it's start with the main developers, but it has been worked on by other people as well. Someone could take Tremulous, modify it with whatever they wanted, and then distribute it as a new binary package (and source code). It belongs to the main developers, but it also belongs to anyone else that wants to do work on it. It belongs to everyone, and no one, you see? It's both free (monetarily) and free (philosophically).

As to why someone would do this, I imagine it started as a group of coders, modlers, texturers, mappers, and sound-effects makers that wanted to both test their skills and give something back to a community they were a part of (the Gloom community, iirc). It was never something they expected to profit from, obviously, because they couldn't make money off of it directly due to the GPL (I believe, not sure). They wanted to make a mod for Quake 3 that was Gloom-esque, they had the ability to do so, and eventually it evolved into it's own standalone game based on the Q3 engine.

Hope that kinda clears things up. Someone can correct me if I said something incorrect.

This is correct here. :)
I make most of my money of hosting servers so I agree with this post.
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