Opening Up the Source

Again, I will remind the reader that I am not going to be developing the whole episode in the chapter, just the important or unique aspects of the episode. The code in the chapters is more focussed on solving the particular problems of the episode being developed. Some people have a need for full episodes. For this reason, I have decided that as soon as I start working on a chapter for this book I will release an open source version of that episode.

While the open source movement has grown greatly in momentum, there are still a lot of people who really do not understand what open source is. There are many books and articles that cover the history of the open source movement, so my description in this section is going to just cover the basics.

Copyrights are restrictive. They are there to protect the creator of a work. This is good because it allows for the commercialization of artistic works. While I am sure there will always be dummies like myself who spend huge amounts of time creating things only to give them away (such as this book you are reading), most of the more artistic things that are created in this world are done at least partially to make money. In fact, I myself hope to make money off of my work by having the work lead to more paying jobs or better yet by having my site suddenly become popular enough that the ads generate enough revenue to pay me a salary.

The alternatives to copyrights is the public domain. Releasing something to the public domain allows anybody to do whatever they want with the material. While it is a noble effort to freely release something to the public domain, greedy people and corporations like to exploit the public domain by making minor changes to a public domain item and releasing it as their own copyrighted material. To make matters worse, when the copyrights of materials that these greedy corporations own are going to expire (causing the material to be released to the public domain) these evil entities lobby the government to extend the duration of copyrights.

Some people who wanted to release there material free of charge and have it distributable by anyone realized this so were hesitant to release their material to the public domain. Instead they released there material for free yet still retained the copyrights. While the material still got around, nobody could make changes to the material without contacting the author.

This is where open source and the creative commons come in. Open source software is copyrighted software that includes a license that allows the user to make changes to the source code but only under the condition that the changed software is also distributed as open source. This means that anyone who wants to can modify the software without needing to contact the author. The only time they would need to contact the author is in the case they wanted to modify the software but did not want to release the changes they made to the public.

What is preventing the greedy person or corporation from making changes to the program and releasing it without the source code? Quite simple. The material is copyrighted! The only thing giving the corporation the right to use and make changes to the source code is the license. If they do not follow the rules outlined in the license then they are infringing on the authors copyrights and are therefore breaking the law.

There is more than one open source license. In fact there are quite a few. Different licenses have different restrictions and requirements attached to them. I myself am using the GNU GPL license as it covers all the concerns I have with releasing my source code. It happens to also be the license that Linux uses. This should not be much of a surprise as a huge amount of the software that is distributed with Linux is GNU software which is why some people like to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux.

By releasing the episodes as open source, you can go through the source code for the entire episode and even make changes to it. Even if you have no interest in changing my code but prefer to create your own, having access to the source code will allow you to see how things work so you have a better idea of how to write your own version. The best part is that by releasing the episodes as open source it is possible for people who care nothing about the source code to place the game on their own sites which exposes this series to more people. After all, what is the point of spending hours creating an episode if no one ever plays it?