[ Thanks to Andrea for this
link. ]
“Even curmudgeons love free games. But my job here is to find
the dark lining on each silvery cloud, so as you might imagine I’ve
found a way to gripe about games being given away at no cost. In
particular, the recent releases of Grand Theft Auto and Hidden
& Dangerous have set my teeth on edge. These new giveaways
include a binary executable and the game assets like levels and
music, but no source. I argue that such a giveaway is not in the
long term the interests of either the developer or the gaming
community, while releasing the source as has happened with several
other games is in their interests. The rule is: free as in beer
isn’t good enough to ensure the survival of a game for the future;
free as in Free, however, can make a game live forever.“One of the best trends set over the past couple of years is the
gradual release of the codebases to commercial games which are far
past their primes. As various companies have given away the source,
they’ve often chosen licenses which vary in restrictions. The
choice of license is, mostly, a non-issue to me; this is game
software after all, not a word processor, and so I hold it to a
lesser standard of freedom. Some, like the GPL on Quake are about
as free as you can get. (All you BSD people can stop right there;
I’m not getting into it…)”