For those software developers and companies where open source doesn’t quite fit their business plan, how about a Quake Commitment?
“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software
Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack
I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.
Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?
This is one of the things I really love about id. The old engines really aren’t of any use to them anymore, so they let hobbyists and such take advantage of it.
But handily for them the data for the games wasn’t GPLed so you needed the shareware version or the original game to play it at first.
I think Quake 3 can now be played without buying the original game so artists must have replicated the art assets in the original game..
Well that’s just it I guess. An old 3D graphics engine isn’t of as much value after 5 years as a proprietary piece of business software where it’s about the processes they replace or facilitate.
Some people are running archaic closed source systems well over 5 years old, who still support vital parts of their business. Opening that source code would just open doors for the competition, instead of the original creators of the software.
Although I like what Id does here. Very much.
Btw, you should also link back to the original picture on Flickr to abide by the Flickr rules. That would also in a single blow fix my attribution, which I consider fulfilled if there’s a link back to my Flickr account, or website
Hi n3wjack, I’m not sure you assertions are necessarily generally true, unless the proprietary software also includes data lock in, which is a poor business beside. I don’t see how the competition benefits at the exclusion of the original creator of the software. With the world becoming more educated, us Westerners are becoming less unique snowflakes, as our solutions. We either continue to innovate, or we become as obsolete as our software.
Actually, I’m not violating the Flickr rule, as I’m not loading the image from Flickr — I love Flickr, but Yahoos are not as stable.
I don’t have any links in the article, so adding one to your site I feel would negatively effect the presentation. Not unlike what Nicholas Carr recently wrote about Experiments in delinkification. Also WordPress’ doesn’t currently allow links in captions
If you prefer I can update the text to be something else though, or if you feel strongly I can remove the image all together.
Well, proprietary software usually goes hand in hand with data lock-in. That is beginning to change though as the bigger customers are becoming aware of that, and want their suppliers to support some open standards (if they exist anyway).
True that, thankfully, as you say it’s a changing world.
Consumer software and web services is also becoming more extendable, or enterprise grade right out of the box. Commodification also helps reduce data lock-in.