Re: Re: Open source?

From: Kaj Sotala <xuenay_at_...>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:34:29 +0300


On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Robert McArthur<rjmcarthur_at_...> wrote:
>
> David Dunham wrote:
>> The technical details are pretty serious, because they prevent one
>> possible goal: more people playing the game.
>
> I don't understand - could you make it clearer how opening the source
> stops a) people playing the game, and b) MORE people playing the game?
> The recording industry seems to be finding that making things available

I'm pretty sure David meant "the technical details are pretty serious, because they prevent the game from being recompiled and run from the source. Thus they prevent one possible goal of making the game open source: having more people play the game".

That being said, I'm not entirely sure if that's a valid reason. The original scripting language used to write the game may be dead, but that doesn't mean people couldn't port at least part of the code to a more recent language. You could, say, take all the commands used in the scripts, write equivalent functions in a programming language of your choice, and then do a search/replace on the original files. Whether or not this is feasible depends on how many different commands were used, how easily their functions can be dechipered, and how much time people are interested in devoting to this project.

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