workman161

You are incredibly naive about the role of financial incentive for success of products, services and inventions.

Open Source removes a considerable amount of options for financial gain, or even the ability to pay for research and development. For every "open source" success there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of proprietary success stories.

The fact of the matter is; success needs financing.

Linux; arguably, the single greatest open-source success story, is nothing more than a Unix clone. A copy of proprietary innovation.

Open source removes only the financial sources that depend on defining a specific number as intellectual property. Suppose a company invented a car that costs $0 to build and runs on a special chemical compound. That company then decides to charge for the compound, but sell the cars for free. Will they still make money? Yes. Eventually they'll make enough money of offset the original investment, so they can start improving their car with more research.

Consider further if they released the specifications for the car into the public domain. A really good engineer would see the design, notice a flaw, and want to fix it. So they fix it and submit the fix to the original company. All the new cars are of a higher quality because of this fix that they didn't have to pay a dime for. The research and development was free for that.

Applying this to software, Redhat produces Redhat Enterprise Linux. Its a special blend of FLOSS and the proper know-how of putting it together right. When you buy a copy of RHEL, you are buying a support contract and paying for the work it took to stitch the pieces together. You're not paying for the software. If you want a free copy of RHEL, use CentOS. If you run into problems with that, your only option is the community who supports CentOS.

Success does need financing, but it doesn't have to come from the same place it has been for the last few years. Its called the product halo. Sure, there are mechanics who can fix their own cars for free, but for the people who don't want to or don't know how, they'll end up paying a professional to fix their free car.

I'm not sure why you point out Linux. It may be just a copy of proprietary innovation, but it is of a higher quality than Unix ever could have become. Open source results in higher quality software. Would you rather restrict your pool of innovation to a small select group of people you hired and have to pay every week, or expand it to the entire human race for free?

The poster you quoted said that Apache and Linux was software (as an aside, the Apache Software Foundation is a corporation).  Windows is software.  Microsoft has nothing to lose by releasing it, right?  In fact, the developers behind Apache very well could have closed their source and sold their web-server, but they chose not to.  I applaud them for that, but they did lose out on some potential capital.

They weren't interested in the capital. Apache started out as a one-man NCSA project indirectly funded by the government. Eventually, everyone else decided they liked it, so the created the non-profit ASF. The ASF's only purpose is to provide a legal representative to developers.

That's not really how DRM works, at all, actually.

I believe it is. In order to decrypt a DVD, your DVD player needs to have the private decryption key. When you buy the DVD player, you aren't just buying a right to use it, you're buying everything thats in it, including a copy of the private key. DRM expects the user to not be able to recover this key to decrypt anything all willy-nilly. At least thats how every multimedia expert understands it.

I agree with most of this, but I was thinking of making a game with the strange business model of "I want to sell my game, and I'd appreciate it if there weren't competing versions of my game out there."

Thats how most companies think. They've got a great product, and they would love to be the only ones selling that product. If they had their way, competition would be eliminated and they'd have their monopoly.. Somehow, we've managed to get along with that since the dawn of modern civilization.

No, you'd be insane not to sell it.  Read up on basic business and you'll understand why open-source is so looked down upon.

Then perhaps I am insane. Perhaps wanting to give back to the people that have brought me so much really is a bad idea.

Patents, patents, patents.

Selling a patent isn't selling an idea. Its selling the right to use their implementation of an idea. The american patent system is seriously flawed, allowing people to patent vague concepts instead of the patentable things the system was originally set up to protect. Have a look at one of IBM's many patents, such as number 7,457,767. It describes a very abstract way to pay for your restaurant meal at your table. With the exception of specific references to a glowing LED or colored display, this is a description of an idea. If you write a patent that describes processing crude oil into gasoline, it'd look about as abstract.

I have.  At price 0, demand is infinite and supply is 0.  However, there is some marginal cost associated with developing software, which is why open-source isn't a great model for businesses.

Not in and of itself. "Developing FOSS" is a very poor business model. "Supporting and implementing the FOSS we develop" is a better one. Take Redhat for example. They are huge contributors to FOSS. They also make oodles of money selling pre-packaged 'solutions' that use what they create.

1) You need to get out more.
2) Which is why there are no software companies.  Oh, wait...
5) It certainly explains why most OSS projects generally devolve into an incoherent, buggy mess.  There isn't any direction, and companies tend to avoid this anarchistic software development model.

1) I can't. The clowns will eat me.

2) Blizzard doesn't depend on their WoW client being uncrackable. They depend on the online communication being uncrackable, which is a little more feasible. Actually I doubt they rely on that a whole lot, because they likely only rely on the player having fun. The same goes for Microsoft Office. If some [insane] person decompiles Word, they have a version of the source code. They can then find out...what? How to...erm...draw a word document? What secret is MS Office hiding in the source that hasn't already been duplicated from deduction in openoffice.org, abiword, gnumerics, or koffice? It might be a file format, but the structure of a .doc is available online. Same for their little ooxml format.

5) Give me an OSS project that turned sour, and I'll give you a bunch more that didn't. Its all about commitment. If an OSS project is just one person, it'll probably go unmaintained and suffer bit rot when the sole developer gets bored. It degrades much faster if the developer isn't a seasoned one. If a developer in KDE gets bored, there's an army of developers ready to take his spot because they have enough devotion towards the community.

As an open source developer, I think its only proper that my two cents get put in. And by 'open source developer', I mean real open source. I mean I hack on projects like the linux kernel, KDE, firefox, and fedora.

If you are interested in how a certain aspect of someone's game was made, ask them! I'm sure they would be more than happy to explain it to you.

Releasing a game open-source opens the door for people to change the sprites and claim it as their own, steal pieces of code that may have taken months to create, or other bad, unwanted things.

Not necessarily. You don't have to release the entire package under an open source license. You can license the sprites, sounds, etc under a separate license that restricts their rights to use them. Your stuff is protected by copyright, so if they steal it they have a lot at risk, namely their reputation as a good person.

People put a lot of work into there games and most of them don't want just anyone to be able to use their code. Some people do like to help other people learn by releasing their projects as open source.

Be honest: do you really think most of the code is so valuable that it must be kept secret?
People put certainly more work into software like 'apache' or even 'linux' - and they are free...!

You'd be surprised. The main reason many companies don't get involved with open source is because of so-called "trade secrets". They believe that their specific implementation of a solution has such an advantage over everyone else, that releasing it would be devastating to their business model.

Apache and Linux aren't companies, so the people involved have nothing to loose by releasing as open source. The programmers behind those projects decided a long time ago, "Hey, I figured out a really neat way to do this. I think other people might want to see how I did this. They might even have a better way."

or the secret password to get onto the server etc.

Thats a flawed security model. Its just like DRM, where the producer is giving the consumer the key and saying "This lets you get in, but don't use it, mmkay?"

And another unfortunate thing is, making the source available here doesn not mean open source. Open source is when the source is avialable and people actually help into it's making.

From my own experience of "open source" which I gave in those subforums, I never got any real bug fixing or coding suggestions from the community.
Personally, "open source" would only get down to hype in such cases.

Also, I'd like to question the OP's idea of "helpfull". If by that you mean easier access to the coding and easier winning the game, then the game developer must be an utter idiot to make such a short-lived game by open-sourcing it.
Open source does have advantages, but cetainly not in some types of game making.

No, no, no, no, no, no. And no. "Open Source" does not mean that people are helping with the development. Open source means the source is freely available, with no strings attached. You can freely distribute and modify the source as you see fit, as long as you remember who has the copyright. Having a community of hackers contribute is entirely optional. I can't think of a disadvantage to making a Game Maker game open source, unless you have a strange business model that relies on people not able to circumvent your game's cracking protection.

This might sound a little crazy but I feel that programming is something private. I mean, everybody has his own ways to deal with situations. Reading someones script is like reading someones mind. I know this is a little exaggerated but it doesn't feel right to let someone read a very complicated script you wrote. Plus I don't think someone else but me understands a single line because I'm not very organized when programming

Yeah, you're crazy. If I wrote a new operating system and it turned out to be incredible, possibly even more incredible than Linux and *BSD combined, I'd be insane to not share it. Read up on how to be a hacker, and you'll understand why closed-source is so looked down upon.

if every game was open source, then no one would make money! imagine if you created a car that runs on oxygen, but instead of selling it you give it to people for free so they can see how it works. no one wants to give away the source which they have worked really hard on.
if you REALLY want to steal someones work because you want to change the sprites and make it your own, then go here:
http://gmc.yoyogames...hp?showforum=38

Lets take your little car analogy and apply it to the real world of research and development. Lets say GM paid a research institution a few million to invent a way to run a car on oxygen. The institution comes through and publishes their findings in a scientific journal. Now the whole world knows how to do it. However, GM just happens to be the first company to know exactly how to manufacture the oxygen car. The car itself is something they can sell. The idea however, cannot. Information wants to be free, so no matter how hard they try to protect it, someone else will invent a way to run a car on oxygen. Its only saving everyone a lot of hassle by telling the world "This is how we made a car run on oxygen! We won't tell you how to make it though, but if you figure it out and improve on the design, we'll be want to improve ours, benefiting the whole world!"

Now, imagine if the researchers never revealed how it works. For one, they'd be shunned by the international community for not publishing how they performed such an incredible breakthrough. They'd be the subject of much ridicule at those fancy scientist cocktail parties. And think about how they themselves would feel if they didn't publish their work. "I just solved the energy crisis, but I'm not allowed to tell anyone. So if the world burns down because of this whole energy deal, its my fault." Thats a lot of pressure there.

If you've taken an economics class though, you'll realize thats not how GM actually rolls. Being forced to improve on the design is a side-effect of the economy in action. It still happens though.

Let's just sum up the reasons why the GMC does not embrace OSS on the most part:
1. OSS is honour-based, just like the academia when we use bibliographies. Newbies have created obviously derived works without giving credit, therefore we choose to take away their privileges because of this abuse.
2. Some of us use GM professionally to make commercial games. We can't have food on our plates and a roof over our heads with skimpy donations for source codes. We have to make money somehow.
3. If you look at the novice forum (whose topic owners are also the most likely to use open-sourced engines), quite a few users are confused at even the simplest constructs of GML. Open-source code is of no use to the large amount of GM novices who can't understand them.
4. We have long since believed that experienced users can usually figure things out for themselves, therefore there is little need for open source. Compare this to giving the research notes of a grade 6 student to a high school student to study from.
5. Most GM projects are managed by a single person. That way, only one kind of logic gets into the game. Anyone else trying to read the logic will have quite a bit of figuring-out to do, which is simply impractical for most medium- to large-scale projects.

If you don't like the GMC because it's not a big fan of OSS, then get out and learn C++. You'll be joining a much bigger OSS community that way.

Just like that, huh? Learning C++ automatically puts you in the OSS community? Thats strange, because my first language in FOSS was JavaScript. Then it was PHP. Only recently did I seriously start getting into C/C++.

Since you provided a list, I'll provide one as well:

1) Perhaps in your case, but it doesn't speak for most people.
2) Again, if you are relying on people to not get your source code to keep you in business, your business model is a little flawed. You aren't selling code. You are selling a way to put all those little algorithms and ideas together in a cool way.
3) Thats no reason to not make it available.
4) If there is no publicly available implementation of an idea, Its called reinventing the wheel. Thats a big no-no.
5) That doesn't explain how someone can get involved with a gigantic-scale project like KDE.

The same way our SSN's aren't "open-source": because there are such things known as "thieves" that will steal your game, edit, and play it off as if it was completely theirs.

You must be using a strange definition of "open-source" that I have never heard of before. My definition means the source material is available for distribution and modification. You can't open source everything. How would I open source my laptop? My oven? My left knee? Those aren't ideas, those are things. You can however, open source a design for my laptop, or a simulation in PHP for my left knee.

And don't forget copyright. Even if you release it as open source, they have no right to claim it as theirs. There is a legal system believe it or not, and copyright still exists today.

Not everyone wants their source codes out there cuz a lot of the people who download don't credit or even claim they made it in the first place. It's a risky thing releasing your source code, and not everyone wants to take that risk.

Keep tabs on your rights, and you don't have anything to worry about. If someone steals your .gmd, changes the copyrights, and republishes it, that is stealing. Taking an open source'd game, adding some new rules to it and re-releasing it is modifying it. There isn't a real risk in making a Game Maker game open source.

-You guys take things too seriously!
-You have the nerve to critize other peoples work, while your own games suck!
-You refuse to let people voice their opions! (AKA comminists!)

-No.
-Our games do not suck.
-No.

Because Game Maker is a good program, but is for people who don't really know how to program.

No, it is for everybody.

You see, I am a nice person, but when I am dis-respected by just about every member here.

This is the first post of yours I bothered to pay attention to, so my only experience with you involves you whining about nothing.

The Game Creators: "The Game Maker Nazis" 110MB: "The Anal Game Makers"

That took A LOT of thought.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Don't feed the trolls.

What a brilliant idea! If there isn't enough memory to spare, then the memory editors can't run! Lets go a step further by assuming that if there is absolutely zero memory (including swapspace), your game can't even run. Now thats some serious protection.