I've noticed more among game coders than among guys who work applications a marked dislike for open source software. Granted, Sourceforge has a bunch of coders interested in gaming projects, but when I talk to folks outside that bubble, they get incredibly protective of their project, no matter how small it is. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe I'm too much of a true believer, but doesn't it seem like most of the amateur/hobbyist projects would work out better if everyone was sharing?

I believe in sharing.

real open source game projects are like that. just keep looking on the right places like freshmeat and such. just mind that in open source game projects not the open sourceness not always also applies to the artistical material.

and there are also different ways of handling open source projects. just having a core team protecting the game core is not bad. the thing is still open but the final instance does make sure the game stays on track.

Depends what the business model for the people writing the code is.

Even people just doing it for fun have some kind of imagined theoretical business model in their head.

If that is incompatible with open source, they are unlikely to want to OS their game.

Of course game code and game content are different - you could easily make a game which has 90% of its code open source and people would still buy it - for the content.

But of course a lot of commercial games these days use so many third party engines, libraries etc, that even if they open the source code, it is useless unless those third parties open theirs too- which is unlikely for a commercial engine / library while it's still making money.

Some people want to protect their MMORPG from hacking by keeping the client source closed. This doesn't work very well, but they think it does.

Mark

Quote: Original post by RPTD
real open source game projects are like that. just keep looking on the right places like freshmeat and such. just mind that in open source game projects not the open sourceness not always also applies to the artistical material.

I work on XConq and it seems I spend most of my time in the non-OS community facing the constant argument for ownership of code. There're are always murmers about building a game using XConq and selling the artistic/design element (XConq's just a strategy hex engine) but I've never seen anyone do it, though the existence of closed-source, selling applications for Linux means it's entirely reasonable. We're thinking of moving the project to sf.net, though, for exposure's sake mainly (Freshmeat's last update on XConq is over three years ago!!!), but even if it never becomes a wildly popular game, the development still seems more stable and quality than the few non-OS game projects I've worked on.