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Why would I care? I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of

Why would I care? I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance. But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but story editors, 2D/3D artists, composers, voice artists etc that create experience, not a tool or platform. Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? Or may be you want to get your hands on petabytes of data that went into production of Avatar so that you could fix a couple of landscapes?

jiggy2011 14y ago
Not sure why this got downvoted. Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.
artsrc 14y ago
> Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it. Games are entertainment. Games are culture. I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current technology. There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and copyright holders can't stop them being made available. I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of Congress, because I value software.
reedlaw 14y ago
All other things being equal, I'd still prefer a free (as in speech) game over a non-free one. The idea that I could go in and change some behavior is so compelling that I would probably spend more for such a game than its closed-source counterpart.
wtracy 14y ago
This does make me wonder what Stallman would say about games where all the executable code is FOSS, but the art assets still have all rights reserved. Granted, such games are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of at all are some of iD's games, and even those were only opened long after the games' initial release dates.)
mikegerwitz 14y ago
Person X is a hypothetical game developer. Person X is not new to software development, but does not have much experience developing games. The best way for Person X to learn is to look at the source code for a game similar to the one he/she wishes to create, to see how the experts did it. Sadly, that game is non-free, and Person X is unable to study the source code. Person X learns nothing other than that he/she has been denied this knowledge and must go seek it out from another source. --- There's other reasons. What if the game saved all my data to a remote server and I wished to modify the game to save it locally? Or, perhaps the game crashed every time I entered a certain room and I did not want to wait for a fix from the original developers (which may never happen --- what if this game is now unsupported due to its age?).
DanBC 14y ago
> Why would I care? You buy a game. It sucks. You wish to sell it, and use the money towards buying another game. Games are moving towards not allowing this type of sale.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Not sure why this got downvoted. Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.

artsrc 14y ago

> Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it. Games are entertainment. Games are culture. I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current technology. There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and copyright holders can't stop them being made available. I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of Congress, because I value software.

reedlaw 14y ago

All other things being equal, I'd still prefer a free (as in speech) game over a non-free one. The idea that I could go in and change some behavior is so compelling that I would probably spend more for such a game than its closed-source counterpart.

wtracy 14y ago

This does make me wonder what Stallman would say about games where all the executable code is FOSS, but the art assets still have all rights reserved. Granted, such games are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of at all are some of iD's games, and even those were only opened long after the games' initial release dates.)

mikegerwitz 14y ago

Person X is a hypothetical game developer. Person X is not new to software development, but does not have much experience developing games. The best way for Person X to learn is to look at the source code for a game similar to the one he/she wishes to create, to see how the experts did it. Sadly, that game is non-free, and Person X is unable to study the source code. Person X learns nothing other than that he/she has been denied this knowledge and must go seek it out from another source. --- There's other reasons. What if the game saved all my data to a remote server and I wished to modify the game to save it locally? Or, perhaps the game crashed every time I entered a certain room and I did not want to wait for a fix from the original developers (which may never happen --- what if this game is now unsupported due to its age?).

DanBC 14y ago

> Why would I care? You buy a game. It sucks. You wish to sell it, and use the money towards buying another game. Games are moving towards not allowing this type of sale.