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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: wahwho AT yahoo.com
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] Opening Closed Source
  • Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:21:52 -0500 (EST)


Hi all,

(One of) my gaming obsessions, back when I did more than I do now, was the
Civilization line of games. Through a series of odd legal circumstances, the
original Civ line from Sid Meier (Civilization, SM's Civilization II, SM's
Alpha Centuari, SM's Civilization III + add ons) gave rise to another line of
similar games produced by another company. The first one was under the
Civilization title (Civilization: Call to Power) and then the lawyers showed
up, nixed the Civilization part, and the sequel was called Call to Power II.

(I'm telling you this because you find many references to the two series
which are confusing, particularly if you follow any of the links below.)

Anyways, CtPII was released a while ago, and although many people liked it,
it was poorly balanced, buggy, and many others (like me) thought it was
horrible. In fact, it sold so badly that Activision cut support for it
almost immediately. The Civ community patched what we were able to with it,
but it still had some fundamental programming flaws that couldn't be fixed.
Well, eventually, after enough complaints and a few pointed remarks about how
the line was certainly never going to bring any money to Activision ever
again, Activision was convinced to completely open-source the game. The
source was released recently...the community is working with it now, running
into minor compilation problems related to a commercial code library that
Activision could not release with the code, but otherwise coping well. It
only took about a week to get an initial work-around for the commercial code,
and a permanent solution is on the way. You can see the entire effort to get
the code r
eleased in the old threads in the CtPII forum, and the work being done now
in the CtPII Source Code forum.

This is the first time I've seen a company release a codebase simply because
the fans rejected the commercial product. Other high-profile games (CtPII
was high profile when it was released) have been opened either at the end of
the product life or in such a way that purchase of the original game was
still required, although even then the company usually retains a bunch of
rights when it happens. It's an interesting result of mass community appeal
to a company. The Civ community has a history of this sort of thing, though,
far more so than any other game or software community I've ever seen. Before
CivIII was even in development, we were sending docs to the developers with
suggestions for the next game...it culminated with a several hundred page
document that was created on the Apolyton web forums and sent to the
developers during initial coding and design. It was a pain to build (I know,
I was one of the editors) but it really influenced the design of the game. A
lot of
the game features you could see were lifted directly out of our document.
Something similar happened, although to a lesser extent, with Alpha Centuari
before CivIII. This is the first time we've had actual code to play with,
though....it'll be interesting.

As users become more sophisticated, I almost wonder if this sort of effort
can become a quality control mechanism in an industry which has historically
used bad software as an incentive to buying newer, but still bad, software.
A problem with opening closed source software like this has been highlighted
by CtPII, though, by the issue of the commercial sound library. It is almost
the reverse of some of the earlier comments about SA and Non-Commercial
license options: how do you deal with closed source upstream if you want to
open your own source? In this case, it seems that it will be a fairly simple
workaround, but that will not always be the case. The problem is only going
to get worse as programming increasingly becomes about gluing together other
people's code modules for your own purposes. How do you deal with the one
person in the stream whom you need, but doesn't want to play by the same
rules? Some (Read: SCO) will even want to change the rules retroactively.

*Interesting note: The release of the code was delayed because the
developers were asked by Activision to remove all comments from the code.
Apparently, there were comments that the legal department was worried would
get them sued for defamation, libel, etc.........the removal of these
comments (in fact, all comments in the code) has caused obvious problems and
the first goal the community set was to recomment the code.

- John

Links:
<A Href="http://www.apolyton.net";
target="_blank">http://www.apolyton.net</A> - Apolyton home.
<A Href="http://www.apolyton.net/forums/";
target="_blank">http://www.apolyton.net/forums/</A> - The forums.
<A Href="http://www.apolyton.net/ctp2/";
target="_blank">http://www.apolyton.net/ctp2/</A> - Call to Power II home.
<A Href="http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100290";
target="_blank">http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100290</A>
- FAQ
<A Href="http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100265";
target="_blank">http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100265</A>
- Initial source problems...



  • [cc-eyebeam] Opening Closed Source, wahwho, 11/18/2003

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