This editorial is about the Elite Club. It's about the continued delays to its opening, and my opinions about this. It's about what I would personally do if I were in charge. Sadly, I'm not - so don't expect this editorial to change things - but I do hope it will change things and I hope that the good folks at Frontier Developments will consider what I have to say here. It's also about the community and how we can help bring the Elite club into existence.

  Back in November, I wrote an editorial "Opensource or bust", and this is really part two of this (hence the title). This time I'm going to specifically talk about the license for the Elite Club's release of Frontier First Encounters - and the hold-ups involved with it.

  To take the bull by the horns, Andrew Gillett has said that the reason for the months of delay is this: getting the license for the source right. He says anything they write or fail to write into the license agreement can have consequences later on, and they have to get it right the first time. I certainly agree with this. However, what I don't understand is why they are writing a brand-new license when there are plenty of perfectly adequate licenses already in existence. And now I'm going to voice my opinion on what existing license that the Elite Club should use and why it should use it.

  Firstly, let's remember what we are dealing with here: a game that is 6 years old and is not going to make money in its own right ever again. On the other hand, FFE does have some innovative features, like the terrain generation. I should imagine that Frontier Developments don't want other game companies freeloading off their work, even if it is six years old. So what licence should they use to make the source free, but at the same time protect it from "embrace and extend" business practises, currently performed so expertly by the likes of Microsoft?

  The answer I believe is not for Frontier Developments spend time on inventing a new license. The answer is to instead embrace the GNU General Public License. Why the GPL? Well, the GPL does several things - the most important being that it not only guarantees the freedom of the source - at the same time, it prevents people from sucking any of the code into closed source projects, such as new games created by a competitor. If a games company wanted to take the now opensourced code for Frontier First Encounters, and create a work that was in any way derived from FFE, they would be legally bound to make their entire work opensource too. No competitor to Frontier Developments for a commercial game is going to want to do this. Any competitor who tried to "embrace and extend" the FFE code into their closed-source product would face a serious drubbing in the press for their odious and illegal business tactics - especially if they were to be discovered doing it covertly. The GPL would guarantee that FFE remains free (as in speech) and would guarantee that no other company could leech of the work of Frontier Developments without breaking the law and looking really bad in the eyes of the gaming public at the same time. And if David Braben decided to use the GPL, his work on having to write a license would be ended in an instant. The GPL is a publically available license that anyone can use for their software. (In fact, in the near future all the code that is used to run alioth.net features such as the EBBS will be made available under the terms of the GNU GPL). The GPL is also in widespread use. IBM publishes software under the GPL. AT&T publishes software under the GPL. If the GPL is good enough to pass the corporate lawyers' eyes in these collosal multinational corporations, it must be a pretty good license from a legal standpoint. These companies have not just been releasing trivial snippets under the GPL - AT&T for one have released VNC, a superb piece of software for remote access and a piece of software I use at work every day. There are probably ten times as many VNC users as there are people who have even heard of FFE.

  Using the GPL will have some other intangible benefits for Frontier Developments: it will create a lot of goodwill towards the company. This publicity can only be beneficial, and it can only help raise the profile of Frontier Developments. It will help the Frontier Developments brand image, and any marketing person can tell you, brand image and brand awareness is incredibly important to future sales.

  Now onto the second part of this editorial: the community, and how it can help Frontier Developments. It looks like Andrew Gillett is the only one that gets to run the Elite Club website, and he doesn't have enough time to do it justice. It is telling that the unofficial Elite Club site has so much more content. Perhaps Andrew ought to try and have the community help, instead of going it alone. Perhaps Andrew ought to ask the webmaster of the unofficial Elite Club website whether he'd like to help. Also, Frontier Developments could look to the opensource community itself for tools for their website: there are many excellent CGI scripts around from the small and simple to the comprehensive. I would suggest that Andrew Gillett takes a look at Slashdot - the entire site is run on opensource software that is available to download. Personally, I think the Elite Club site could use the code that runs Slashdot (called Slash) very well. The same goes for mailing lists: there is heaps of good mailing list management software around.

  The community can do a lot to help oil the wheels of the Elite Club, and Andrew should be less shy about asking for help or advice especially since Frontier Developments is a very busy place.

  In summary, I think Frontier Developments should stop trying to micromanage the Elite Club: it should GPL the source and be done with it, then allow the Elite community to help out with the Elite Club. The community is small but enthusiastic, and there's no reason why Frontier Devlepments must host everything itself. I think Frontier Developments has everything to gain and little to lose by GPLing the FFE source and being less shy about asking the community at large to help. That's what a club is: it's not just one person running it and a bunch of people downloading the files. A club is where everyone is involved to some extent or other, and there are enough people in the community to form the active core of this club.

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Elite club (official site)

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Sourceforge: A good source of opensource software

Opensource or Bust: November's editorial on the subject