Source Code?

The perfect (more accurately, for those of you who don't like normative statements, best) solution to all of our woes is as follows.

And before you write me off and preach about the apparent necessity of intellectual property, let me just say that you're absolutely right that I dislike intellectual property, but please don't write me off as a wacky guy or blandly deny such a thing as impossible or out of the question.

There are tons of industries that do just fine without intellectual property, and no market is fundamentally different from the other since they are subject to the same laws of economics without exception.

Here are some examples of industries/ideas without IP protection:

• Fashion

• Food industry (cannot copyright a recipe, or the look and feel of even the most unique dish)

• Automobiles (cannot copyright their sculptural design)

• Furniture

• Magic tricks

• Hairdos

• Open source software

• Databases

• Tattoo artists

• Jokes

• Fireworks displays

• The rules of games

• The smell of perfume

So, we see it's not necessary for any sort of incentive to develop things, obviously, hair care industries still research and develop new shampoos, and you don't see chemical engineers complaining about their treatment.
I firmly believe the free market is, on principle and in reality, superior in every way as a mean for every good and just end proposed to be fixed by the positive law of the modern state.

Now, this thread isn't so much a debate against the 'establishment' as it is a request to Uber. Uber is a pretty cool guy, and they're nice in most things, but this would be an unparalleled gesture of utmost trust and love. Sure, it might be viewed as naive by the rest of the industry, it might even hurt Uber's sales, but, as a whole, the industry would be enriched for the fact that they are supplying what most would view as a superior product in that a rich and vibrant community could carry on the development (just as the TA community has carried on development through the years with many a recent break through even without the source.), and thus it would provide more purchasing power to the dollar (albeit very slight) and might even serve as an edge over the competition.

So, even if it's impossible now, Uber, please keep it in the back of your head further down the line when you look back at good old PA. Maybe you'll consider releasing the source code, for us.

Oh, and, hey, check out the rest of that wiki page, it's full of great information! http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Intellectual_Property

Well seeing as Uber kind of wants to make money off the engine/source code I don't know if we'll be getting it for free... ^^;

I'd be pretty epic happy if we did though.

It would be awesome

And there are other ways to monetize stuff like this. Check out that wiki page for some of them. It goes over how software developers (Edit: ARE) incentivized to make stuff.
It provides a ton of real examples of the benefits of no IP and the ways some make money off of it!

Releasing the code now, even though earlier it was said to be a very unlikely (issues with i.e. the fact they use some 3rd party libs that they can't just put together with the source?) thing to happen would be a pretty aggressive "we DO care for you guys after all" move.
Though at the same time I can imagine people going "ha now they dump the code on us and leave us alone with it".
I'd certainly be convinced to up my pledge on HR, even if HR stays online only. A company that gives out the source for a game like PA deserves money for any footstep they do. Modding for PA would skyrocket. Bugfixes potentially as well. Imagine PA's source completely on github with nerds like myself forking it to patch bugs out of it. Yes that's not an easy to manage scenario, but if it were to work out... wow.
I think epic released the unreal engine source a while ago on github, but only for subscribers that payed 10$ or so a month. That'd be awesome as well. I'd probably pay 50$ a month for access to the PA sources so I can work on fixing bugs and add modding hooks xD.

I don't think making the code of PA public would lose them money on these things. Just because the code is public does NOT mean that anybody may use it for any purpose. You can put a license on it that disallows any commercial usage. You can also hide the code behind a "subscribe for 5$ for access" wall in addition to that. etc.

Personally I'm all for PA engine become open source with game content should remain proprietary.
It's one of things I really hope to happen one day.

Basically available source code won't hurt to commercial point because code of client-server game like PA have to be released under some license like AGPLv3 that disallow creation of proprietary software based on it.

PA only use two proprietary middleware: Coherent and FMOD.
Both can be replaced easily by open source alternatives.

Obviously there is no FMOD replacement that can do everything FMOD do, but sound it's not the main part of RTS.

In my humble opinion, it should be released at least "maybe someday" so that the community can push the game into it's next evolution before it gets split up by different corporate hands and the puzzle pieces can never be put back together, like has happened with FA.

with that FAF has hit a dead end as to what they can do and here I am.

Wait there is an open source replacement for coherent? And you think it would be *easy* to replace coherent with it?
I'd imagine it is easier to talk to the coherent guys to be allowed to bundle the compiled coherent parts that are required. They are part of PA itself anyway as it is.

FMOD... well who cares for sound features. Playing back a bit of music and sounds can't be that hard, can it?

Anyway PA opensource would be like christmas of the next 1000 years in one day. I may die from the endorphin shock.

I seen something like that, but not really sure about licenses.
Good thing we know how does Coherent work and what is it based on.

Easy? Obviously no, but it's possible.
Obviously it's might not work as good as Coherent.

Coherent license likely will conflict with open source licenses. For game like PA it's reasonable to choose license that deny to hidden server-side code, e.g AGPL.

PS: Obviously I talk about situation when code released under open source (OSI-approved) license. What Epic doing for UE it's good for engine, but for particular game it's not.

As example of Coherent replacement there is MIT-licensed Web UI based for UE4 based on Qt:
https://github.com/ufna/VaQuoleUI

I dunno much about that kind of topic. Basically the PA code depends on the presence of some precompiled coherent libs? Those libs are distributed with PA anyway. So Uber at least could i.e. put the code for PA without assets and without the coherent lib on github. People who own the game could copy in the missing parts from PA to the github checkout, or not? coherent would not be distributed in any new way.

It's only suitable if Coherent license library headers under compatible license. Also there is some gray zone where you using proprietary product internal APIs in source code it's might also cause copyright issues. It's depend on how much PA's code depend on Coherent and we don't know anything about it. :-(

So basically that would be at the mercy of coherent and Uber might have to pay them to get them to license it to them under a modified license. Duh. I hate all this license madness stuff.

EDIT:
Theory time! Would if Uber would build a little wrapper library around coherent that doesnt directly copy the api coherent has, but offers the functions in a same fashion. Then that library is only provided as precompiled, depending on coherent, with the lib and coherent itself only available from a PA installation. That way coherent's code and even API stay hidden and we use Uber's API instead.

Yes something like that is possible. You can always create wrapper for proprietary library or some viral open source license.

You guys are ready to create SSX-Colin Annihilation if you had the opportunity.

I'm surprised at such a positive reaction.
I guess the internet is more welcoming to these sorts of ideas than I thought.
This gives me hope!

The nerds like it, the rest go "wtf are they even talking about".
No wonder nobody is negative towards it

Not sure if serious... but eff me if that is not the most awesome thing Uber could possibly do. I am still a huge fan of the engine, after all, even though I am entirely unable to appreciate its awesomeness due to living in the middle of ISP-nowhere.

I hope that down the line, when PA is well beyond profitability, the source is released. It seems unlikely that the source would be released before then, but I'd take it

Unfortunately, that would have to include Human Resources and all the other potential games using the engine. I would not hold my breath.