3 ms·

That's not a counterpoint to releasing it as OSS, though. There are lots of OSS projects where creators don't require community input.

wolfgke 10y ago
> There are lots of OSS projects where creators don't require community input. Then what is the reason that you want to urge Tarn and Zach Adams to release DF as open source?
- RubenSandwich 10y ago
  As stated by meddlepal above: "My great fear for this game is the developer dies and we lose an amazing piece of tech with him."
5310938 10y ago
Provided the license is at least Q-Public or stricter. Otherwise expect a Neo-Dwarf-Fortress in no time to put pressure on the original author and let the world know that he is actually a hindrance to DF development.
schoen 10y ago
NetHack is a kind of famous example where the Dev Team doesn't use a public version control repository, traditionally didn't use a public bugtracker, doesn't use a public mailing list or IRC channel, and traditionally has made releases less than once a year. They also didn't promise to respond to proposed patches or feature requests, though they often acted on them if they thought they were useful or thematic. Some aspects of this have been controversial and there's certainly the idea that it's let NetHack improvements be much too slow, but it's existed for many years this way, and it's completely open source. Also the Free Software Foundation's own in-house parts of GNU were largely this way especially in previous decades. There was an official maintainer who would make periodic releases. If you had an idea for the maintainer, you could e-mail and propose it. The maintainer might say "Thanks" and then put your code in a future release, or not. It was relatively hierarchical and secretive in terms of the actual development process, without a particular emphasis on being collaborative. In this case I've generally thought it was because FSF's philosophy didn't emphasize collaborative development methodology, as opposed to people's right to change their individual copies of software, and people's right to fork projects. We often associate free and open source software with collaborative and transparent development, but there are occasional cases where it's definitely not that.
- jquast 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you are aware, nethack is now hosted on github and commits are public https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack The 'Net' part of the project Nethack is so named because it was developed over the internet and discussed on the internet (newsgroups). It's the first game to be developed by multiple contributors over the internet and released on the internet that I am aware of. The 'Open' of OpenBSD is more towards your point: NetBSD was open source and made releases, but did not show public commit history. When Theo's private repository privileges were removed, he was unable to contribute any longer because his patches against the latest public source was too far behind the current private source, so they would be rejected, but he had no ability to bring it up to date. And so "Open" of OpenBSD is because the commits are public and open -- the first to share their VCS history publicly that I'm aware of. I believe they invented the first "anonymous cvs" system for this very purpose.
  - schoen 10y ago
    > I'm not sure if you are aware, nethack is now hosted on github and commits are public Wow, quite the big change from how they used to work! > The 'Open' of OpenBSD is more towards your point That's a great example, thanks.

wolfgke 10y ago

> There are lots of OSS projects where creators don't require community input. Then what is the reason that you want to urge Tarn and Zach Adams to release DF as open source?

RubenSandwich 10y ago
As stated by meddlepal above: "My great fear for this game is the developer dies and we lose an amazing piece of tech with him."

5310938 10y ago

Provided the license is at least Q-Public or stricter. Otherwise expect a Neo-Dwarf-Fortress in no time to put pressure on the original author and let the world know that he is actually a hindrance to DF development.

schoen 10y ago

NetHack is a kind of famous example where the Dev Team doesn't use a public version control repository, traditionally didn't use a public bugtracker, doesn't use a public mailing list or IRC channel, and traditionally has made releases less than once a year. They also didn't promise to respond to proposed patches or feature requests, though they often acted on them if they thought they were useful or thematic. Some aspects of this have been controversial and there's certainly the idea that it's let NetHack improvements be much too slow, but it's existed for many years this way, and it's completely open source. Also the Free Software Foundation's own in-house parts of GNU were largely this way especially in previous decades. There was an official maintainer who would make periodic releases. If you had an idea for the maintainer, you could e-mail and propose it. The maintainer might say "Thanks" and then put your code in a future release, or not. It was relatively hierarchical and secretive in terms of the actual development process, without a particular emphasis on being collaborative. In this case I've generally thought it was because FSF's philosophy didn't emphasize collaborative development methodology, as opposed to people's right to change their individual copies of software, and people's right to fork projects. We often associate free and open source software with collaborative and transparent development, but there are occasional cases where it's definitely not that.

jquast 10y ago
I'm not sure if you are aware, nethack is now hosted on github and commits are public https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack The 'Net' part of the project Nethack is so named because it was developed over the internet and discussed on the internet (newsgroups). It's the first game to be developed by multiple contributors over the internet and released on the internet that I am aware of. The 'Open' of OpenBSD is more towards your point: NetBSD was open source and made releases, but did not show public commit history. When Theo's private repository privileges were removed, he was unable to contribute any longer because his patches against the latest public source was too far behind the current private source, so they would be rejected, but he had no ability to bring it up to date. And so "Open" of OpenBSD is because the commits are public and open -- the first to share their VCS history publicly that I'm aware of. I believe they invented the first "anonymous cvs" system for this very purpose.
- schoen 10y ago
  > I'm not sure if you are aware, nethack is now hosted on github and commits are public Wow, quite the big change from how they used to work! > The 'Open' of OpenBSD is more towards your point That's a great example, thanks.