Well, I guess it was more of a theoretical question. If someone were to go through the trouble of making tremendous resources for a massive SCI game, it wouldn't be too much more trouble to code an engine that pieces them all together without SCI Studio. That can't be too hard if they used the SCI Studio source code to serve as a general model for how it's done. But as a person of philosophical principal, that solution just doesn't feel right.
Here is one of the ideas that provoked that question. Robin Gravel wrote this in another thread that was started by someone to promote an incentive toward making good games: "If you're looking for SCI quality games like Sierra did, you'll be disapointed. You know, we're making games for fun, not to make money." This would seem to mean that profit is neccessarily promote product. Maybe there are people who want others to profit so that they can play even better games. Is it ethical for an SCI Studio license to discriminate against such a community?
Being someone who likes to drive an issue into the ground, I have some more provoking thoughts about this question. I was under the impression that the open source community serves to enhance the free market with cheaper and superior tools for their projects so that humanity can accomplish better things as a whole, whether that market is powered by capitalism or not. That happens to be some of the principal behind academic research as well.
Let me show you what I mean with some examples. I was considering other open source development environments (i.e. the Python programming language, wxWindows, etc.) and all of them that I can see allow the development of commercial applications. Look at the Pygame readme about the distribution license:
http://www.pygame.org/readme.html. It says, "Closed source and commercial games are fine." (There is a lot of historical precedence for this. Look at how much Red Hat profits off of linux.) So, what is the difference between the SCI Studio development environment and any other development environment, except that it might be higher level and more specific than some of the others. Where does one draw the line?
I guess I can understand why some people feel that profit through the use of free tools is taboo. Someone spends time and effort on something that profits and they don't get anything for it. Make sure that you safeguard yourselves from this. The only solution I can think of is require people who profit to sign a contract that contributes royalties to the great group of people who provided such an excellent tool. Maybe that can get put into the license. Sierra can't sue people for profiting from games with a similar genre, and if they can sue for using a similar file format, then all you need to do is implement a feature that saves everything into a new file format. And add some features that don't exist in the typical Sierra game. (I hope that you don't strictly limit yourselves to Sierra style capabilities for some nostalgic reason.)
Just some afternoon thoughts.
David
Show Posts