open source

It may shock some people to know that, once upon a time, I would sit with some friends and play D&D - the Forgotten Realms settings, for those in the know. It was relatively cheap entertainment - lots of caffeine, snacks, some dice, character sheets and your imagination were all that were needed once you had an agreeable group together. Sure, you had to buy the books from TSR, Inc. Of course, there are some denizens of the RPG community that support the stereotype of D&D players - and then there are also the born-again-but-don't-believe-in-reincarnation-Christians who believe D&D is devil worship and that the armor class of their beliefs is infinite. Still, I know a lot of people who have enjoyed D&D to a great extent and some who even continue to.

The beauty of that era was that with guidebooks, the Monster's Compendium and some photocopied character sheets, the rules and books were guidelines and were general rules to be applied within a setting that any dungeon master wished. A great dungeon master (DM) made a game interesting and enthralling, but all the die rolling a DM could make the game stutter. Sitting on the carpeted floor of an apartment in the 1980s with enough caffeine in me to kill a small dragon (pick a color), I saw that a DM could use some software to keep from having to roll a die all the time to guide the game. Back in 1987/1988, I wrote TSR, Inc. about the idea - back when one paid for postage. I never got a response, and soon after that I stopped playing D&D altogether, but I continued reading the Forgotten Realms books. What a rich setting the chosen few had to unleash their imaginations!

Wizards of the Coast took over the franchise back in 1997, and they have tried to do good things on computers. To some extent, they have done well. They have put out some good games and some really bad ones - but in a niche where there is no competition, they decided to become the content creators and the framework maintainers. This takes away a major part of the game - the user created content. Sure, they have had stabs at user created content through their games, where people could develop quests and so on, but the reality of it is that that aspect of their products seemed more of an afterthought than a feature - perhaps even handicapped purposefully to assure people paid for the content. Over the years, since its release, I've played through Neverwinter Nights 2 in almost every possible permutation - but once you play a game, it loses the surprise and context. It becomes less about the story and more about, "well, I need to say xyz here to get <insert something> here so that I can beat the ending" - blech. Yawn. Puke.

In case you missed what I'm saying: It sucks and it sucks vast quantities of orifices and appendages found in the hairy nether regions of land mammals. Yes, I went out of my way to be nice.

Then came the MMORPG. I tried MMORPGs back in the days of Asheron's Call and Everquest. The concept was pretty good, though it had one major flaw: you're implicitly competing with people who, apparently, do not hold jobs and who have the maturity level of teenage boys - perhaps because they are teenage boys or suffer a peculiar form of arrested development that has them screaming at their mother for more cheesy poofs. In fact, the word 'fucktard' was created to describe these players that infest MMORPGs. If there's anything that the Internet should have taught MMORPG designers, it's that some people enjoy screwing things up for others in games. I see no reason why a mature adult, or someone aspiring to maturity, would work a full day and deal with all the morons.

Some things shouldn't be played with large numbers of people. Very few people have the time to build the uber-high level characters that everyone aspires to. No one plays to be the 10th level swordsman in a world where 70th level morons will come by, whack you over the head and sell your equipment for some potions. And so they made some environments were PK (Player Killing/Killer) were not possible - but people, particularly the person whose maturity never graduated elementary school, will always find a way to thrive by annoyance.

That's why the desktop games are so potentially entertaining. You can completely avoid annoying people, perhaps playing by yourself or playing with a few people across a network. For some reason, though, Wizards of the Coast hasn't taken that all too seriously and their stranglehold keeps others from doing it. In my eyes, they are completely killing what could have been a thriving industry - and the way that they could have gone about doing that was by simply building great tools for people to tell their own stories. Sure, 'Mask of the Betrayer' and other NWN2 addons were pretty well done, but they were railroaded and the tools for the quest creation were not at the same level.

Instead, they try to be everything to everyone and failing quite well at it.

Clearly I have an opinion - an opinion that has remain unchanged over a decade. I'm going to explain it here so that when people ask me why I dislike 'permissive' open source licenses - the core reason being that code can be incorporated in later proprietary software. Here are a few plausible scenarios with these licenses that I find, at the least, distasteful.

• An individual or entity ('corporations are people' inclusive, though they're not) can take a project under one of these licenses, make some relatively cosmetic changes and proprietarily license the end product. They then market the product well and sell it to people who probably don't even know about the original open source project. That this hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't, just like the engines in the shuttle not exploding beforehand did not keep the engines from exploding that memorable time. This means that the well intentioned efforts of the developers are lost and they have placed themselves in a position where they gain no recompense for their efforts because of the very license they chose.
• The same as the previous, with the exception that the software development was done for a government and funded by tax payers. The government may later pay licensing for the same code under a proprietary license because of superior marketing, thus forcing the taxpayer to pay twice (or more) for the same code.

Granted, these things may seem extreme - but that they didn't happen yet doesn't mean that they won't. I, for one, don't feel that I should voluntarily expend effort on an open source project if someone can take the work and close the source. That seems self defeating to me, and of course some people think it's a brilliant idea because they somehow believe that one day they might be the large company that can use the software in such a manner. My time and energy is worth something; I don't see why someone else should be able to profit from anything I do without a need to compensate me for my efforts.

I've worked on proprietary code to pay the bills - I likely will in the future because my bill collectors won't accept code in payment - but that, at least, is 'honest' - it's clear who the code belongs to and I get paid for my efforts. With GPL compatible licensing, I can contribute and know that the code will be used in the spirit it was worked on, and that should my code be truly worthwhile, people will know me by my contributions. The MIT License, and those like it, allow that to be circumvented. 

The only plausible use I see for the MIT LIcense are for co-ops between software companies, where software companies work together to form a common base that they can all profit from. Since it's unlikely that they would all market the same product, it seems more likely that it would be  that the software they work on would be used to provide a service. For example, if publishing companies rubbed a few brain cells together (I've been waiting years to see it happen), they could actually fork an open source CMS and create something that they could all use and share the costs of maintaining without needing to release the source to anyone else. Of course, that would require companies that view each other as competitors to work together, and that may require the present generation of business leaders to retire or die.

So that's it. I don't have a problem if you're happy with the MIT Licensing. It has worked well for some projects, there is no denying it - but I find the risks, particularly the scenarios above, too much of a risk.

Imagine that all the software written is the basis for all the software now.

Imagine that some of the software of the past does not have source code that can be accessed.