Put the wish list for porting projects HERE...

[Dragonlord]

1) You're the one making the license decision. What you choose is your call. I'm not complaining, only commenting on concerns.

Which is what I called for. There's no reason to consider yourself holding a holy grail in licensing if somebody threated the waters already for quite some time. People tend to call me stubborn ( to even having through about doing a game engine on my own... for example on the BA forums :P ) but I know when to turn an open ear to opinions provided by certain people. Never hurts to check out other opinions before choosing sides on a road fork.

4) If anything is a loophole to proprietarize code it's the BSD license variants and the MIT/X11 license. They do NOTHING to prohibit closing off access to derivative works against the licensed work. For some things, this makes sense. Stallman will even agree that some licensing along those lines makes sense (See: libvorbis...).

Coumands did this on the BulletPhysics library. But his goal had been explicitly to release the code as-is. Not a surprise to me somehow since he's been in that business for quite a long time and is used to make code under NDA .

Best bet overall, really. You may still want to keep it GPLed. But that has consequences to it you might want to fully understand before keeping it there.

That I noticed. Not the first time I spend countless times thinking about the pros and cons. While I like the GPL and I released stuff already by it it's a tricky monster if you aim for the big cake. For the time being I'm going to leave the license as is and will decide which one to take ( most probably LGPL after what I've seen up to now ) before release.

This means you can come up with a proper Bink module if you want for cutscenes (with the FOSS stuff done right, you could remove most of the desire for that, but it's still there if you want it... ) for example and it'd be fine as long as your license on the resulting game didn't preclude someone doing RE work and ripping the Bink module out- it wouldn't be a supported act, mind, but you see where I'm going with on that.

Don't worry. Bink is not going to be part of the show. That's going to be handled using a Video Module for fetching the files from a video file and piping it into the Graphic Module for rendering. Framework for this is not done yet but it will come once I figured out a way to deal with AVI ( xVid codec ) encoding/decoding in a sane way ( seen a couple of libs but it's all somehow hacked together from one end to the other ).

Before making a decision, I'd see if Sony and Nintendo (Don't bother with MS, you'll know what their answer will be and it'll not be what they'll actually accept as an fait accompli on your part and theirs...) on what their take on the use of LGPLed stuff would be on a title on their console.

Yeah that's going to be a rough cruise once I get there. Didn't expect much else than a kick in the butt from M$ but after all there's still the "homebrew scene"... if you know what I mean :P . Sony and Nintendo will be still rough though. Most probably I'm going to hook up with you beforehand for some tips since you know dealing with this kind of people already. Definitely better than trying to get the touch down done all by your own.

[Svartalf]

Damn, i didnt know licensing was such a difficult thing. I havent placed any code under a F/OS kinda license, mainly because i dont know if they are at an appropiate level, but I have 10 page research paper that i would like to release to the public under a free open like license. I know about the creative commons, and was considering the most unrestrictive license, the CC-BY-SA, but i read somewhere that it is incompatible with the GPL FDL (free documentation license). My paper is a research paper on free software in schools in developing countries. It's not a computer program, or the documentation for a computer program. Would anyone know which would be an appropiate license for it?

Unless you're expecting someone to incorporate substantive portions of your content in that paper in theirs (Quoting minimal amounts with proper attribution is and always has been considered fair use, despite any claims of licensing, etc. to the contrary... ) if the CC-BY-SA license grant does what you intend, why worry about the GFDL grant compatibility?

[niniendowarrior]

I also think part of the problem here is branding. I'd surmise that if Valve had something like Steam for Linux and asked the big publishers with Linux games to sign up, they'd leap head first into it.

On the other hand, have something like LGP, and you need to bring them over for group therapy sessions before they get comfortable with it.

[xav1r]

...so i take it nothing came out of this thread? Svartalf did you actually get a chance to really look into any of the suggestions we gave?

[Svartalf]

...so i take it nothing came out of this thread? Svartalf did you actually get a chance to really look into any of the suggestions we gave?

There's one that's got NDA's waiting to be signed and a system set up for version tracking for additional developer access- the publisher is going to be the studio for the title in question. Right now, I'm in a crunch to get things out the door for my day job and try to get something accomplished for the Pandora in the way of base firmware and possibly a title or two so a lot of things have been...delayed a bit.

As it stands, I never QUITE expected the results we have in hand here on the thread.

As for the rest of the leads... Harpoon's pretty much a dead-end (Changes to the list will be made shortly...). A discussion started with them, but nothing further than the initial discussions ever happened. Shame. Falcon4's going nowhere because I've not heard back from the guys doing the work. I'll try again here shortly on that. The InterCorp stuff's gone the furthest from the one I mention above (Until the NDA's are actioned and we've got source access, I won't say which one on the list is... ) at the moment as is Powerslave- but there's still legal snags with a remix version of those that needs resolution. I'm chit-chatting with the lead gameplay developer at Bizarre Creations to see if the pet project he's got for the Pandora (He's porting an undisclosed top rated Dreamcast title to the Pandora... Right now, he's got the crowd over there playing the guessing game... Could be MSR, Fur Fighters, several others...) could be made available on Linux desktops in addition to the Pandora version he's already ported. Other than that, nothing's been chased after yet.

I'm going to be off until the beginning of next year, probably on Thursday or Friday of next week. Things should be able to get wrapped up on the stuff I've got that's keeping me from following up on some of the more promising leads, so the work on this thread will pick up during that time. Hopefully there'll be more looked into leads being more fully looked into.

As always... The list is as it stands unless we have info to update the list. If you want to, please do a bit of digging into the looking into list. Some of them are AAA or top quality Casual titles with source available- if you're a developer, why not grab the source and try your hand at making it work on Linux? Some of them will need leg work. Anything contributed, since this is a community endeavor (like the OpenPandora project is...), is appreciated.

[me262]

So mostly, there's good things in the works, but the companies don't want you talking about them until they're sure-fire.

As I progress in my studies, I may talk to Ambrosia or a few others that I've suggested, but at this point, I'm only at drawing up Preliminary Design Documents. No programming to speak of short of prior schooling and research.

[Svartalf]

So mostly, there's good things in the works, but the companies don't want you talking about them until they're sure-fire.

Yep. That's how it works in the business world. Oftentimes even Joint Ventures are subject to Non-Disclosures (I just actioned a set for an unrelated venture I'm trying to get going with an associate of mine from a previous contracting gig. Can't say any more- it's NDA'ed... ) to protect the JV and the parties of it from predatory actions from competitors.

As I progress in my studies, I may talk to Ambrosia or a few others that I've suggested, but at this point, I'm only at drawing up Preliminary Design Documents. No programming to speak of short of prior schooling and research.

That doesn't mean you can't do some work all the same. Just don't impair your studies over it until later on in that degree...

(Speaking of which, I've been a bit busy, I'll get you an answer here if you're still needing it here shortly...)

[Aradreth]

An intresting development, Myst Online is going open source (server + client). They don't say under what license they will be using but it is probably one to keep an eye on.

Bit of background:
Myst Online is an Adventure/puzzle MMO with a Mac client (should make doing a port easier) and is developed by Cyan Worlds previously published by Ubisoft then gametap and now being self published.

[Svartalf]

An intresting development, Myst Online is going open source (server + client). They don't say under what license they will be using but it is probably one to keep an eye on.

I caught that detail and it'd be interesting to make a client for this one.

Bit of background:
Myst Online is an Adventure/puzzle MMO with a Mac client (should make doing a port easier) and is developed by Cyan Worlds previously published by Ubisoft then gametap and now being self published.

Heh... There's more to it than that. While it may not be a FPS engine, Plasma is what they used for both Myst Online and for realMyst- that's part of the open sourcing as well. The only snag would be that it does use PhysX and while it's supported on Linux, the hardware's not at this point in time (Though they may have made NVidia GPGPU support possible as of this time...). I'd also be curious about realMyst and who's got rights to it as that'd be nice as well.

[Aradreth]

Heh... There's more to it than that. While it may not be a FPS engine, Plasma is what they used for both Myst Online and for realMyst- that's part of the open sourcing as well. The only snag would be that it does use PhysX and while it's supported on Linux, the hardware's not at this point in time (Though they may have made NVidia GPGPU support possible as of this time...). I'd also be curious about realMyst and who's got rights to it as that'd be nice as well.

I would have thought the PhysX support for linux would be the same as for the Mac version or an ATI user under windows as both lack GPGPU support.