A Duo Of Peculiar Games Being Ported To Linux

[lapis]

When I buy Cola, I pay for the work of developing new sodas. Why can't we have all their trade secrets?

Because a physical product is different than a non physical "product".

When you pay for a non physical product you already have paid all development of product. For example the product costs 2 million and people have paid 3 million .Why society cannot use the product freely?

You don t want trade secrets of software company .You want to use the software freely because you already have paid for the software.

It's like to buy a cola and Coca Cola forbid you to use the product to clean things.


Society cannot pay licenses forever ( 90 years is too much time)

People paid a lot for windows 95,and Microsoft will never release the software for public domain.

[Jarrod558]

Nah, I don't think so.

[Ancurio]

Everybody knows the ingredients.
They're listed on the on the can and on the label on the bottle.

Nope. You can just list many things as "flavoring" (at least here in Germany) without specifying details.
Amounts of ingredients aren't listed either.

[uid313]

Oh, do they? AFAIK no one besides two peoples to this date know the real ingredients to Cola..

Everybody knows the ingredients.
They're listed on the on the can and on the label on the bottle.

[bridgman]

Oh, do they? AFAIK no one besides two peoples to this date know the real ingredients to Cola..

Yep, and Coca Cola is developing new drinks like crazy. Take away the revenue/profit stream from existing products and what happens to R&D ?

[Ancurio]

Because you pay a tiny fraction of the work spread out over a long time (longer than "today", typically) and once the trade secrets get out competition tends to go up, prices tend to go down, and the ability of future sales to finish paying off the development work (or paying for the next development work depending on your accounting model) gets broken.

Oh, do they? AFAIK no one besides two peoples to this date know the real ingredients to Cola..

[uid313]

When I buy Cola, I pay for the work of developing new sodas. Why can't we have all their trade secrets?

There OpenCola, a open cola with open source recipe!

[bridgman]

When I buy Cola, I pay for the work of developing new sodas. Why can't we have all their trade secrets?

Because you pay a tiny fraction of the work spread out over a long time (longer than "today", typically) and once the trade secrets get out competition tends to go up, prices tend to go down, and the ability of future sales to finish paying off the development work (or paying for the next development work depending on your accounting model) gets broken.

There was a brief period during the 70s and 80s when government funding paid for most of the expensive R&D and companies could either make lots of money or develop a lot of cool new stuff or both, but those times are largely gone now and funding R&D is really hard work again.

[Ancurio]

Funding proprietary games is a bad idea.People are paying the work.
Why people cannot have acess the game data and source code?
They can release using a permissive license to fork and create proprietary versions.

The developers need to relese the source code and game data .But proprietary model never releases nothing.Unless you wait 90 years.


I prefer to pay a proprietary game to release the game data and source code using a Opensource license.Even if costs more money.

When I buy Cola, I pay for the work of developing new sodas. Why can't we have all their trade secrets?

[jaggers]

Frankly, I want those Tierra/AGI Entertainment ports of Sierra games on Linux!

That can be done now. They use Adventure Game Studio, which went open-source in October 2010 (though closed-source builds for Linux have been produced in the past).

Check it out: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags

It builds for 32-bit and 64-bit distros. In fact, that's how http://www.infamous-quests.com is planning on delivering their Kickstarted adventure game, Quest for Infamy to their Linux backers

I've played Wadjet Eye's demo for Resonance and The Shivah using my own build of the AGS interpreter. I'll try out the AGDI and Infamous Adventures remakes (they did one King's Quest and also Space Quest II). So far, it works pretty well!