Christoph Hormann wrote:
> I have quite a problem with this "public buying intellectual property" 
> (but this isn't specific to this case, i had the same with Blender for 
> example).  First of all it's "buying the cat in the sack".  

I agree, but unfortunately being open can only occur in one direction. 
The cat can't be put back into the sack either.

However, to help that I moved some of the internal Leveller classes into 
the free open SDK, to give more of an idea of what kind of code quality 
can be expected. And some of the plug-ins, Daylon XaoS and Defence 
Condition are also open source. I've actually been doing open source for 
several years, and the relationship with the original copyright holders 
has always been positive. John Beale, for example, was able to promptly 
get all the optimizations to the HF-Lab functions improved by the Erode 
plug-in. All GPL, and it's worked well. The new SDK docs also give an 
idea as to what to expect for the OpenLev docs.

For what's it worth, I'm really not interested in just dumping code. I 
see so much of that from other people and it's such a big turn-off. I 
want to set a really high standard of open source publishing, where 
people get the resources to do their own mods and builds to near turnkey 
quality. I wish I could have the Defence Condition tech docs better, but 
with real funding, I'm aiming to get it right for OpenLev.


> And then the 
> idea of open source (IMO, others might see this differently) is that 
> making the software open source is of benefit for everyone involved.  By 
> requiring 'the public' to buy it free you essentially say in this 
> particular case (in comparison to all the other open source software 
> that exists) the benefit is more on the public side so you require a 
> compensation.  Whether or not this is justified for Leveller i can't 
> really judge.

It's a good point. As a capitalist, I like the classic idea of the 
marketplace. In the end, I'm just making an offer, and the other person 
can decide whether it appeals to him or not. And it's nice to have all 
different kinds of offers on the table -- choice is good. I don't think 
there's any other way of deciding value in an ecosystem, so someone has 
to make the offer to start.

Leveller began in pure demand-supply terms too... I was minding my own 
business fiddling around with a little POV-Ray tool when people started 
saying, "If you make it do this I'd pay such-and-such..."


>> I don't want this turning into a repeat of HF-Lab/HLA/KLevel.
> 
> Hmm.  I always thought Leveller had a different intention than those 
> projects (although they might claim they have the same intention as 
> Leveller :-)).

Yeah, to be technically fair I think KLevel was more Leveller-esque. But 
at the time, HF-Lab and HLA were two of the only heightfield-specific 
games in town that were FOSS.


> HF-Lab etc. seem mainly pure interactive heightfield editors/generators 
> and this is not much needed any more, let alone commercially viable 
> because of several reasons:
> 
> - support for higher color depth in general imaging programs, you don't 
> need to learn a new program to do simple heightfield sculpturing.
> - increasing detail requirements make it less viable to edit 
> heightfields interactively as a whole and make heightfields less 
> interesting as a modelling concept for artificial terrain.

I see heightfields as a datatype that will always (somewhere, somehow) 
need an interactive editor. It's just one of those tools that is good to 
have. A non-trivial percentage of people are actually interested in the 
import/export modules, or some of the plug-ins. There's also the people 
who have plans for future apps that are merely based on the code, such 
as open equivalents of more expensive high-end apps. In this case they 
can quickly and inexpensively gain a big lead in dev time.


> Now the idea of Leveller to me seems to be more than a pure heightfield 
> editor.  I am not sure if this or better code/documentation/professional 
> support etc. make a difference but this will be interesting to see.

Yeah, that's where I'm at with it; just putting the offer there and 
seeing where the interest is.


Ray

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