Slashdot is running a story about how Alexey Pajitnov hates the open source/free software movement. Might this chill the development of HUE, Texmaster, or Lockjaw?
Considering that Texmaster isn't free (yet?), I doubt this would slow its development. More seriously, Alexey has little to do with the modern state of Tetris as far as I know, so developing free clones doesn't disrespect his wishes any more than it disrespects TTC, who would rather you buy games with that Authentic stamp anyway.
Seeing as Tetris stems from communism, rather than capitalism, surely it's well suited for open-source games?
but that also means alexey didn't see a dime from Tetris for quite a while, so maybe he's just shocked that anyone would want to give away software
i've got to go with my man alexey on this one. what can i say, i like money. ideas become respected and taken seriously once people learn how to use them to earn profit. it's the best motivator for improvement.
And plenty of Internet companies have used Apache (free software) and either Perl (free software) or PHP (also free software), sometimes on top of on GNU/Linux (free software) or FreeBSD (also free software), to make money. Google runs Linux on its web servers, and look how high its stock price shot. The TiVo DVR runs Linux. Even apart from a popular Linksys wireless router that runs Linux, Cisco Systems appears to be a big fan of Linux and FreeBSD. I'll let Google explain the rest.
It amazes me how people who are for capitalism, which is supposed to have the big advantage of giving people choices, are so against letting people make the choice to give stuff away. Then again, people have forgotten the whole "choices" aspect of free markets, hence remarks like good 'ol Alexey's...
i didn't say anything was wrong with open-source. by all means if you have the leisure time for a hobby, there's nothing wrong about it. i was just pointing out that proprietary software tends to be of higher quality than open source (not the case for s.m.g.) because of the money-motivator. sure there's great open source stuff out there, and i use the hell out of it. i was just saying that trying to make a buck is a good thing.
I've read/seen quite a few Pajitnov interviews now, and it seems to me he really doesn't care that much about Tetris or his role in TTC, and brushes it off as "part of the job". Maybe that's why Tetris has detiriorated so much along the years, and why abominations like infinity even exist. I would so wish to be able to talk to him face to face and at least try to intrigue him with the spirit and competitiveness of the Sega/Arika brand of Tetris games, and how it's all on the edge of falling apart with the ever tightening yearly guideline. He has the veto power to actually say STOP-- this isn't going any further. I weep for how the 2008 guideline is going to be, and if and how the next TGM game will be. If it's going to be anything like TGM-ACE, Arika might as well merge with PopCap games and start catering to 40-year-old married housewives...
Well, $160 is a lot of money for only two forum categories covering a niche game like Tetris. On the other hand, if people throw down 160.000 like nothing (*cough* see sig *cough*) then it's petty change in comparison.
Yeah, but good 'ol Alexey has a huge problem with it. His thing isn't a difference in quality. It's the fact that some businesses might be losing money since somebody else is giving something away. Thing is, that's part of anything that looks even remotely like a market economy (since I'm not going to say anywhere is ACTUALLY close to one). That's just how it goes, and people like him, who tend to claim to believe in capitalism by my experiences, deny that.
He's a nice enough guy, but I don't think I'd value his opinion on many topics. An open source program like, say, MAME, simply could not exist commercially. It's not profitable to make something that obsesses over making every little detail perfect, and has a massive scope.
i chose phpbb2 because i was already familiar with it and i liked the way it looked, not because it was the best. the wiki's software, i believe, is the best out there, and it happens to be free. speaking of, i was really thinking about maybe going with invision power, but something tells me you guys would have a problem with that.
Only if you can keep all the current posts. And no i don't mean making a archive website, that is worse then less desirable.
I don't think any of us have a reason to have a problem with it. Unless it's more annoying to use (or, as cdsboy says, we'd lose a bunch of stuff)...after all, you have the right to choose to use the free or pay ones. I only say "free or pay ones" since I don't know of any other possibilities.
Heh, sounds about like the stance of good 'ole Billie G. and Mickey$oft <G>. Seems that many times freeware (or open-source) software excedes the stability and quality of comparible retail software, which always seems to prompt the commercial entities to bitch about how freeware/open-source 'destroys the market'... "bah", I say.
