RE: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

The following is off-topic, but I always make at least one rebuttal to
"don't touch Windows!" religion.  Skip now if you don't want to read.

Ian Gulliver wrote:
>
> The original clarification of this idea comes from Felix von Leitner.
>
> Please do not port software to Windows, or, by extension, assist in
> porting software to non-free operating systems.  While GPL licensed
> software specifically permits this, DON'T DO IT AND DON'T
> HELP.  Making
> Windows more usable gives users less reason to switch to free software
> and more reason to continue funnelling time, effort and money into
> people and companies who take away freedom at every opportunity.

Well, I take the world view that open source is definitely possible on
Windows, and that the underlying choice of OS should be rendered
irrelevant.  If I had my way, everything would run on top of OpenGL and
it would be a completely self-contained "OS" that's portable to
anywhere.  But I haven't had my way yet.  It's a huuuuge project, and
not one I can afford to work on right now.  I looked at doing such a
thing under Python, but not enough extant code was available to cobble
it together.

There's a point at which us MIT/BSD guys laugh and say, you GPL guys
don't really believe in freedom.  You believe in controlling people.
GPL as a tool works fine in many circumstances.  GPL as a religion is
darned tiresome.

I don't think I'd want to start an open source game project on the net
and license it MIT/BSD.  Some company would just come along, take the
complete game, and sell it.  I think that 'free beer' money should go to
the people who built the complete game.

A *3D engine*, on the other hand, is a different story.  It is not a
complete game, it is an underlying project component.  One such MIT
licensed engine is The Nebula Device http://nebuladevice.cubik.org .
Radon Labs provided the first big cut of code for it, and they continue
to do code drops for the public project.  How do they stand to ever make
money for their effort?  Well, you can buy their proprietary Maya
plug-in for the engine.  You don't have to, you could write your own,
but it would be a lot of work.  I think it's perfectly reasonable for
Radon Labs to provide developers a way to save work, in exchange for
$$$.  They've offered a huge chunk of 'free stuff' right up front, both
in terms of speech and beer.  They are deserving.  Hope their business
model continues to work.

Crystal Space http://crystal.sourceforge.net/ is the nearest open source
competitor to Nebula2. It is licensed under the LGPL, a reasonable if
not ideal license for commercial work.  Last I checked (6 months ago) it
was way behind Nebula2 in capabilities.  Why?  Because Crystal Space has
no commercial component.  It's all volunteer, there's no for-profit
company driving any part of the development.  So who's really getting
the job done here?  Seems like commercial Windows game developers are
getting the job done, because that's the main market for games.  It's
where the 3D developer talent and effort is strongest.

Lots of programming language authors have released their work under
MIT/BSD licenses.  This makes language variants more likely to flourish.
The language research can and does get folded back into the progenitor
language - human personalities willing!  So much of open source is about
ego schisms.  Look at GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs, for instance.  Often it's
not really about the license, it's about the people.  Or different
project schedules and needed results, if you want to take that view.

GPL adherants are laboring under the delusion that theirs is the only
open source model that can possibly be successful.  The OSI demonstrates
otherwise.  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.