A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Marshall Van Alstyne <marshall AT MIT.EDU>]

There's an interesting post from slashdot on how open source may not be
the best development model for games.  

http://www.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=8146

The author argues that the main reasons are (attempted summary):

(1) long development cycles with very short consumption cycles, that limit useful feedback.

Two years [of development] is a long time in the gaming world. It would be very hard to keep any sort of public interest alive with weekly test releases where the only change might be that a weapon was tweaked, a room was added halfway through the game, the lighting was adjusted, or load time was slightly reduced. From the audience perspective, games don't get better gradually. That would be like expecting the general public to sit through the same movie every week for two years as the editing was tuned and small scenes were gradually added. Not only would the audience not enjoy it, they would also be likely to riot after about six months of showings.

(2)  reuse of characters & graphics is difficult

Now imagine that the developers for our open source Doom 3 can take the art from Doom 2 to use as a base for Doom 3. But this isn't very useful. The artist can't load the art for an Imp monster circa 1993 into The GIMP, apply a filter, and suddenly have an amazing 3-d model with bump mapping. In fact, the only area of game development where reuse is a major advantage is the ability to use an existing game engine. But most closed source developers already do this.

It would be interesting to see if we could design licensing
mechanisms that would facilitate open content for markets with these
characteristics.

MVA