Duel Monsters Online is one of my favorite games on BYOND and it hasn't been up for a while. Instead of waiting for it to come back up, I've started writing my own DMO ripoff.
One of the problems I think is always holding DMO back is the lack cards. It's certainly not stopping the game from being great, but it could have turned it from great to fantastic.
If I follow through on releasing my DMO ripoff, I plan on releasing the source code for it. The idea is to make up for DMO's weakness of only having so many available cards. If someone wants a card in the game, they can program it themselves. BTW, I'm talking about a Duel Monsters version that is automated, not the Duel Monsters Expert's version where everything is manual. I'm okay with people using the source to release their own version, it'll make things more competitive, though it might split the community.
Do you think releasing the game as open source will be a good idea? Would anyone be interested in helping or making their own DMO-ripoff, or is the manual version of Duel Monsters the way to go?
ID:151526
 Jun 25 2010, 10:51 am (Edited on Jun 25 2010, 10:57 am)
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Falacy wrote:
I think it would be better to create some sort of community collaborative "open source" project. The problem is how can I put an open source policy on a copyrighted game and how can I depend on everyone who downloads the source to follow the license? | |
Mardok wrote:
The problem is how can I put an open source policy on a copyrighted game and how can I depend on everyone who downloads the source to follow the license? That's not at all what I was talking about. | |
Open-source licenses depend on copyright. Having the copyright to a work doesn't mean nobody else can use it - it means nobody else can use it unless they follow your terms.
The open-source licenses are just rather wide terms. For example, the BSD license pretty much just says "Here's some code, do what you want with it". The GPL license is from another school - it requires that if someone else uses your GPL-licensed code, they must also release their code under the GPL (It's 'viral'). Assuming your code is written entirely by you (or contains source code released under terms compatible with your license - probably any BYOND library or code someone has given you on the forums, etc. etc.), you own the copyright to it, you can put it under any license you want. Put up the archive file with a note indicating that it's released under whatever license you want, and a LICENSE file inside it detailing the exact license terms. As this game is fundamentally a derivative work of somebody else's copyrighted content, things get a little trickier. You'd have to talk to a lawyer to get a complete picture of the legality. My personal suggestion would be to do it and worry about the legality of the issue if and when you get a cease-and-desist order. You can't really 'depend' on everyone who downloads the source to follow the license. It depends on people behaving the right way. Theoretically you could sue someone who was using your code in ways counter to the license, but the questionable legality of the game in the first place makes that a losing proposition. My advice there is to ignore the issue entirely. Either release your code under a permissive license (like the BSD license), so there isn't really any way that they can 'not follow' the license, or release it under the GPL and ignore the people who use the code without contributing back. There's no benefit to chasing them, so why bother? | |
Do you not find it morally wrong that you are talking about how to copywrite ideas and creations that someone else has a copywrite to?
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If you just release the source, then there will be 300 different versions of the game, each with 5 unique cards, instead of one full version of the game with 1,500.