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By Dylan Smith
This editorial is about a real life issue affecting the Elite community, rather than an FEU-fiction one! The title should hint at you a little about what it's going to be about. Opensource or bust. Specifically, the Elite Club - which we are all still eagerly awaiting for. While I think it's excellent that Frontier Developments are doing this, I think their implementation is going to cause lots of headaches, and might even cause the Elite Club to fail - or maybe just not do very well - in one of its primary missions. That mission being of course making FE:2 and FFE better. Andrew Gillett, of Frontier Developments, has already strongly hinted on their model for running the Elite Club. There will be two tiers - a free membership, where you can download the games and get information - and a higher "Sqadron" tier, where you can have access to the FE:2 and FFE sourcecode to make improvements to the game. So far, the idea for the higher tier of membership is to charge about UKP 10-20, have the members sign a nondisclosure agreement, and then get access to the source. However - to be quite honest - this will stifle the development of the Elite Club, and won't net Frontier Developments anything much monetarily. Perhaps a few hundred quid tops, which really is hardly worth it, considering the extra effort it will cause. What extra effort will it cause? Firstly, they have to take the money. Secondly, they are going to have to make sure their servers are extra secure. Thirdly, they are talking about a shareware scheme to redistribute any money taken in by shareware versions of FE:2 and FFE. In my personal opinion, this is doomed for disaster. Why? Let's look at this shareware thing. Redistributing the money taken in will be terribly contentious. I work in the software industry, and I know how difficult it is to measure the effort and performance put in even when employees are in the same office every day. If the club members are offsite, how do you measure it? You can't! For example, the Elite Club might pay per line of code. But this isn't fair. Being a software developer, I know that some things that are barely a dozen lines of code may take twice as long as some things that are hundreds of lines of code. Measuring lines of code is difficult too - programming styles can mean one programmer writes very few lines of code to generate exactly the same as another programmer who likes to split their lines up for readibility. This is especially true for the C language, which FFE was written in. OK - so you divvy up the money based on how much time various people spent. How do you measure that? Do they want us to all fill out time cards? Even then - how do you know the timecard is truthful? Why not decide to just give up and split the money equally? That's going to annoy and alienate those who spent hundreds of hours on something when they get the same money as someone who maybe spent three or four hours. It's simply a minefield which could kill off the spirit of the Elite Club. And I so want the Elite Club to succeed, and I bet Frontier Developments does too. Now assuming that the shareware issue is sorted out, what about the others? Well, the higher-tier rules as they look to me are very exclusionary, and will exclude about 90% of the people who have the skill, time, enthusiasm and inclination to contribute to the Elite Club. The non-disclosure agreement will exclude all those working on Elite tribute projects (that's Millennium 4, TEP, Galileo, Elite TNK and others) and looking at alt.fan.elite's contributors, that's probably most of the potential candidates. It also excludes the under-18s. When I was an under-18, I had a lot of enthusiasm for projects like this - and although I'm tooting my own trumpet, I had the skills too. Yet I would have been disqualified. The joining fee also excludes foreigners, since FDL are only taking cheques. It costs a fortune to wire money from the United States. It might be nigh on impossible to send the money from Indonesia, where the talented Laga Mahesa lives. The shareware concept and NDA also excludes those of us who work in the software industry due to the employment contracts we usually sign. Look at those groups I mentioned in the last paragraph. How many of you reading this who would like to work on the source code fall into those categories? Most of you, probably! So what's the solution? Well, in my opinion, Frontier Developments have nothing to lose, and a huge gain, if they make the FE:2 and FFE sources opensource. What is opensource? Well, opensource is where you open up the source code in a free way - free as in free beer, and free as in free speech. Instead of a restrictive NDA, the license agreement prevents those who modify and use the source from restricting it. Funnily enough, I think the shareware idea is more of a Windows environment thing. Unix people usually think of opensourcing as their first idea of putting out software, or releasing older games. For some reason, Windows/DOS people think shareware and closed-source. That's just an observation I've made - there's hardly any good opensource Windows/Dos stuff, but there's heaps of good opensource Unix stuff. Take the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) for example - as powerful as Photoshop, but it's opensource. In fact, look at one of the most popular Unix implementations out there - Linux - which itself is opensource! What would be in it for Frontier Developments and the Elite Club if they did that? Firstly, they would gain massively from the excellent PR it would generate. It would also finally negate all the computer press's bad feelings over the Bell-vs-Braben lawsuits. I'm not going to comment on that specific case (to declare an interest, I think Braben was right), but the lawsuits have gained all the participants quite a lot of bad karma. Embracing opensource will I think negate this. Opensourcing the games might get good publicity in places like Slashdot, which would raise the profile of Frontier Developments enormously (and Slashdot readers are generally gamers). It's not as if Frontier Developments would be doing a high-risk trailblazing thing to opensource an old game - if I'm not mistaken, id Software opensource all their old games. Outside the game world, but talking of products that have been out for a while, IBM is gaining a massive amount of good PR by releasing highly viable products like the Andrew Filesystem and JFS as opensource. These products aren't trivial and have more users than the entire Elite series put together - yet the biggest computer company on the planet (IBM actually sells more software than Microsoft, believe it or not) is making a viable product opensource. You may go via one of these filesystems as you browse the web! IBM is now seen by many people as one of the White Knights of the computer industry (as opposed to Microsoft's tarnished image) due to their support of opensource software. Mentioning the web also leads on to Apache. The Elite Club's webserver runs Apache. Guess what - Apache is opensource, and it's good, and it's innovative. In fact, Apache has probably the biggest market share of webservers out there. Alioth.Net runs Apache on its CobaltRaQ too. Of course, it can be argued that opensourcing will give away all of Frontier Developments' trade secrets. But FFE is 5 years old, and FE:2 is 7 years old. Anyone who really wanted to get the trade secrets would just reverse engineer the code. Already, FFE has been reverse engineered. In my opinion, these concerns are not valid due to the heavy reverse engineering that FFE has already undergone. It might mean a paradigm shift for Frontier Developments to think in terms of opensource, but it is one that is definitely worth making - especially concerning old games. Other objections might be made to the GNU Public License (GPL, or copyleft as it's known in the trade). Not everyone likes the GPL, and not everyone likes all of Richard Stallman's ideas (Stallman, or RMS for short, was instrumental in starting the whole Opensource movement). However, Frontier Developments can use their own opensource license. IBM doesn't use the GPL. Neither does Mozilla (aka Netscape - yes, Netscape is opensource). To summarize my points here, I think with the closed NDA-type of environment, the Elite Club may well flounder. Opensourcing might not guarantee wild success, but it's far more likely - and as an opensource project, the Elite Club efforts will take far less of Frontier Developments' time in administration. It will also net Frontier Developments good publicity and the company will be seen as a friend of the opensource movement, like id Software is. Happily, Andrew Gillett has said on alt.fan.elite that they will at least be considering opensource. I sincerely hope they choose this method. Not only do Frontier Developments have nothing to lose, they have a lot to gain by embracing opensource! Read comments/make comments on this article Sourceforge - A good source for Opensource projects
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