May 2 2015, 4:10 pm
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Drakemoore
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Fair enough, so I'm guessing the web client is built from the ground up and doesn't include that proprietary code?
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Lummox JR wrote:
The why of it has been discussed on previous threads and isn't something I intend to rehash. might I suggest a FAQ for the very purpose of pointing people like myself to questions you have already answered? I believe there was one for the web client but never a more general one. I can understand not wanting to restate something but I hope you can understand wanting to know something. I can't force you to do anything though. To put it most simply, not all parts of the code can be open-sourced, and right now those parts are integrated too much with the rest. Are you talking about these?  | |
A quick search turned up this post:
http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1754732#comment13446623 | |
Tom wrote:
but it is largely because the software is tied into the hub, which is also the source of our business at the moment. Even this one isn't too specific. The biggest thing you get out of it is that the code is tied to the hub and that apparently the "business" strategy is still strong. Neblim wrote: Everyone who left and requested it to be community driven has left already. We left with disappointment and disgust at what "business" brought to Byond. ^ Eventually I am probably going to be a part of this crowd. Well that's enough derail for me. This thread is supposed to be about the webclient. My apologies for taking it off course. | |
Neblim's attitude is one thing we definitely wouldn't want driving this community. The people who've been most helpful have been the ones who've been on top of providing solid bug reports with as much info as they can, or acting as a voice of reason in the forums. The hub and various security issues are tied in with reasons the entire platform can't be open-sourced, but then the people who complain the most about open source are also the least willing to accept such things as an answer.
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Ah, I agree on the Neblim bit. I honestly have been in and out of Byond a lot lately and I wasn't aware that you and Tom had already laid out reasons why Byond couldn't be open sourced.
I think the thing that always concerned me the most about Byond is the appearance of the project to most players / developers is that the general status of the project seeming like a legacy or 'maintained' but not under active development with new features and so forth. I think it's great that there's progress being made on the Web Client and I can't wait to see it be fully released. Just out of curiosity, have you and Tom ever tried contacting students or student organizations at different colleges and universities for interns? Sometimes students or recent graduates work for free part time in order to get work experience and or build their portfolio. You could have things reasonably safe with NDAs and such. | |
My first full-time job was as a subcontractor working with grad students. The professor I worked with had a theory on the work quality and investment of students according to what level of education they were currently pursuing, and I saw the truth of that in action. I was working with a math library those students created, written in C++ and intended to be cross-platform. It had a lot of design issues that, knowing what I know now, I would have approached differently, and it was rife with bugs and poor documentation.
So in a way that was pretty good practice for BYOND's code when I got to work with it, although the design and bug issues in BYOND weren't nearly as severe. (The documentation was about the same.) Point being, though, it takes a lot of time to get acquainted with the code, and I don't think students working for free would be able to contribute measurably to it. One of the very first things I discovered in BYOND was that it's way easier to add a new feature than to fix a bug, but the flip side of that is that new features often come with new bugs. I feel a lot better about the webclient though, because it was designed from the outset for the client end of it to be open-source. There's really no way to prevent that anyway, although the Dart code hasn't yet been released. (It will be.) I actually want to get that to a point where it can be fully opened, and then people can begin to contribute to that code in a bigger way. Already, though, it's entirely possible to create brand new controls, and if anyone created one that was useful across a variety of games I'd be ecstatic to include it in the standard distribution. Or for that matter, improvements to existing controls would be welcome also. | |