Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Red or Blue?

The following just happened today at my day job:

Me: (out of nowhere) Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: … uhhhh…
Other Coworker: What?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: What is this about?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s going on?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s that about?
Me: Why does everyone ask me that?!?
Other Coworker: (pointing at me) Dweeb.

I’m the whimsical one at work, if you couldn’t tell. B-)

Categories
Geek / Technical Politics/Government

Free Software and the Power of Language

It’s been coming up a lot recently, and I, as a Gnu/Linux user and Free Software advocate, am getting tired of being lumped in with software pirates. Free Software and Open Source Software is not about getting something for nothing. They aren’t about stealing anyone’s livelihood. They aren’t about ripping off hard-working programmers.

The use of the word “free” is unfortunate in that people think it means “$0” or “no price”. The Free Software Foundation won’t use another word because they want to emphasize freedom; “open source” doesn’t call to mind the idea of freedom at all. The FSF philosophy is that all users should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

Free Software refers to freedom, not price. Most people get that part.

What is frustrating is the number of people who support Free Software AND miss the entire concept of freedom. These people are worse than the ones who are against Free Software because they think it is about giving away things for free; they make it seem like the GPL was created specifically to prevent commercial use!

I’ve argued that the distinction between “free software” and “commercial software” is false; they are not mutually exclusive. A lot of people on all sides of the argument are careless with these words, which only muddies the waters and makes “free software” much more confusing to talk about. The use of the right words makes all the difference. “Death Tax” sounds a lot worse than “Estate Tax”, for instance, and the use of one term instead of the other helps to change the way you think, especially if you can’t be bothered to learn about the facts.

From gnu.org’s Words to Avoid:

“Free software” does not mean “non-commercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.

“Commercial”

Please don’t use “commercial” as a synonym for “non-free.” That confuses two entirely different issues.

A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity. A commercial program can be free or non-free, depending on its license. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual can be free or non-free, depending on its license. The two questions, what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its users have, are independent.

In the first decade of the Free Software Movement, free software packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or by nonprofit organizations such as the FSF and universities. Later, in the 90s, free commercial software started to appear.

Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so we should encourage it. But people who think that “commercial” means “non-free” will tend to think that the “free commercial” combination is self-contradictory, and dismiss the possibility. Let’s be careful not to use the word “commercial” in that way.

How many anti-Free Software zealots would be surprised at the above? Heck, how many pro-Free Software zealots would be surprised at the above? From flame wars on a forum to government reports to FUD spread by certain organizations and companies, the use of the word “commercial” as opposite “Free Software” or “open source” makes people think that FOSS must necessarily be non-commercial. It’s not.

When talking about free software, it is best to avoid using terms like “give away” or “for free”, because those terms imply that the issue is about price, not freedom. Some common terms such as “piracy” embody opinions we hope you won’t endorse.

Let me put that part in bold: Some common terms such as “piracy” embody opinions we hope you won’t endorse.

For those who think that the FSF is about supporting piracy, how do you explain that statement?

On the same page:

“Piracy”

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.

If you don’t believe that illegal copying is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “prohibited copying” or “unauthorized copying” are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”

Perhaps that last line might sound like support for piracy, and I have to admit that I also questioned what it meant. I sent an email to the FSF asking for clarification. The response was from Program Assistant Tony Wieczorek:

Our concerns with people referring to piracy are that companies use that pejorative term to denounce all of our efforts. We are afraid that people will call our legitimate and legal practices piracy for lack of a better term. That, of course, is not the case at all. We believe that software should be free, and we use the law (copyright law, in the case of the GPL) to achieve that (albeit in a way that most people don’t use that law – this is the idea of copyleft).

I think that paragraph is also meant to point out that equating copying software with raping and pillaging ships is gauche. The two crimes are nowhere near similar and people should make that point when they speak of illegal copying.

So the FSF doesn’t endorse piracy and wants to make sure that Free Software is considered distinct from something illegal. I feel that they are making two arguments at once and make their points needlessly confusing, but the second argument was that copyright infringement isn’t something comparable to what pirates did/do.

For an example of why the confusion about FOSS and commercial software is a problem, check out this news item on Linux Games announcing Caravel Games’ DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold. One comment in response to the idea of an open source shareware game:

WTF? What on earth is open source shareware?

Nevermind that id had released the source to a number of their older games while still requiring you to purchase the game to play it. The idea that Free and Open Source software can also be commercial software is too confusing for a lot of people. The expectation is that if it is commercial, then it can’t possibly be Free Software.

There are practical concerns, of course. You can’t just release your software under the GPL and expect to be able to sell it the same exact way you sold your proprietary software. Still, it is possible to make a profit by way of software that doesn’t restrict your customers’ freedoms. While it is easier to earn revenue through an MMO game through subscriptions — “The client can be both Free and free, but to play on our awesome servers, you’ll need to pay” — it is also possible to sell a non-MMO, open source game and make a profit. If you immediately make the argument that EXAMPLE XYZ proves that Free and Open Source Shareware can’t work, recognize that you are coming to a conclusion based on one counterexample. Rather than asking “How can I make it work?”, you are simply stating “It can’t work.”

If you think that the effort to make a profit from Free and Open Source Software is too great to justify, that’s fine. You’ve made what is hopefully a well-informed decision for yourself. Just realize that it isn’t impossible to make money from FOSS, that it isn’t illegal to use or create FOSS, and that it isn’t about getting something for nothing. Free Software is not about supporting piracy. It isn’t the opposite of commercial software. It’s about freedom, and when it comes to the GPL specifically, the license requires that commercial software be possible. It’s not a contradiction.

You’ll find people online who support FOSS but also make confusing statements about licensing. For a good example, the Linux Gamers’ Game List at icculus.org lists games that are available for Gnu/Linux. The license section would presumably tell you what the license for the game entails, but it actually doesn’t. It tells you whether or not it costs money. The reason I was given was that someone’s grandmother would get confused about the idea that a game could be Free and cost money. I think that the column shouldn’t be called “License” if it isn’t really about the license. I would think labeling it “Cost” would avoid confusion if the purpose of the listing is to help out people who would be confused about licensing issues. I also think that most grandmothers probably wouldn’t think to look for the list in question, let alone find it.

Another example? Pick one out of the many Free games, and you’ll most likely find one. The GPL was for computer code. It makes no sense when it comes to an image or a piece of music. Still, most authors will simply license the entire game under the GPL without a thought.

People will argue that the best part of FOSS is that it doesn’t cost anything. Now, when you were first told about the FSF, the GPL, and Free Software, who did you hear it from first? Was it from people who said, “It’s about freedom! Here, let me explain what I mean…” or was it from “It doesn’t cost anything!” Most detractors seem to hear it from the latter. For example, you’ll see lines like “But the FSF is in the minority when it comes to convincing developers that giving away their software for free is the right thing to do.” Reading that line, you’d think that the Free Software Foundation WAS trying to convince people to give away code at no cost. You’d also be more inclined to believe that the GPL was about giving away something for nothing and that FOSS is about stealing the livelihood of those would dare to try to make their software into a commercial product. The funny part is that the same people who complain that the GPL is about giving away software also prefer to use code licensed under BSD, MIT, and similar licenses that basically allow you to take code and make it your own…essentially, taking without giving. So while the GPL is supposedly guilty of forcing people to give away their code for nothing, the accusors prefer code that actually is available for nothing. Interesting, eh? But I digress…

Multiply each of the above with the millions of people on the World Wide Web, and you can see why people would be confused about the nature of Free Software. There is a definite minority who are “on message” for Free Software, but they have to compete with the language of those who think FOSS is evil — calling it a cancer or referring to supporters as communists — as well as those who think it is great but don’t actually get the idea behind it.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Blonde Joke Getting Out of Hand

Thomas Warfield has posted about the best blonde joke ever. It’s a good one so I thought I would post it here.

It’s also got the geek in me thinking. Who came up with it?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Back on the ‘Net

I finally got Internet access at my new apartment, so I am back in business! Check out the results of a quick speed test at DSL Reports:

w00t!! For the past week I’ve been finding indie games while I was at work, but now I can download them. Last night, I downloaded a bunch at once, and they were all on my hard drive within moments.

me.setEmotion( EMOTION_HAPPY );

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Gaming Over Christmas Vacation

Christmas Eve is a big deal in my family, and so after dinner, my girlfriend and I traveled from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio to spend the week with her family, where Christmas Day was more important. We drove through a huge bank of fog, otherwise known as Indiana. Loads of fun, that fog. Luckily, I played a number of games during that week.

Her cousin is a huge gamer, and so we played Super Mario Strikers among other Gamecube games. Playing with four people was definitely a lot of fun, and kicking explosives at soccer players made it feel like European soccer. B-)

I also brought my Gameboy from the 80s. Yes, the big, clunky one that was pocket-sized fun that didn’t actually fit in your pocket yet. It had Tetris, which helped pass the time when my girlfriend was driving. I still haven’t gotten the huge rocket, but then I didn’t play it as much as my sister or mother. I had other games to occupy my time…games that I still haven’t completed. B-(

I played more games of Sorry! in two days than I think I have ever played in my life. My girlfriend’s nephew really liked playing the game. I also played Lunch Money, which is a fun card game about school yard bullying. I haven’t participated in a LAN party in some time, but I managed to keep up with my trash talking abilities.

My girlfriend’s nephew and I also played on the computer a bit. He wanted to go to Nick.com to play Nickelodeon-related games. The games weren’t all that compelling, but for a six-year-old, they would be perfectly fine; however, what the heck was up with all of the ads? Everytime we clicked on a new game, we had to sit through the same Lucky Charms ad. Over and over. I get it! He gets the cereal! Can we assume that I’ve seen this ad?!? I would even have accepted a different ad, but no ads would have been preferred.

After I got fed up with the ads, I took him over to check out Puppy Invaders over at PuppyGames.net. It’s a cool Space Invaders clone, and it is playable on the homepage. He really liked this game, and it was fun since I controlled movement while he shot at the enemies. He also really liked the smart bombs, even though they didn’t do anything more than end the current level. We had good, old-fashioned quality fun. No stupidly repetitive ads here.

But there was still a lot of Sorry!.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

IGF 2006 Finalists Announced

The 2006 Independent Games Festival finalists have been announced. Among the finalists are a few games that run on Gnu/Linux, such as Darwinia, Tribal Trouble, and Professor Fizzwizzle.

I’ve played those three games, if only in demo form, so I know they’re good. I’m also in the middle of reviewing Weird Worlds, another finalist which is also really good.

I decided to check out a few of the other games. For instance, Glow Worm looked like a typical match-3 puzzle game, but it is a finalist for Innovation in Visual Art, so I had to check it out. It definitely deserves to be in the running, and it is a fun game to boot. I also tried Strange Attractors. Well, actually tried isn’t a good word. I got to level 25. I should have gone to sleep, but I couldn’t help it. And that giant head! I would have destroyed it if I hadn’t teleported and got stuck right into those damaging electric beams!

Suffice it to say that the 2006 IGF looks like it is full of quality games.

Categories
Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

Distributing Binaries: G++, libstdc++, and Static Linking

I’ve been asking certain Gnu/Linux-using friends to test out Oracle’s Eye while I work on it. I’ve already found that I need to specify SDL_image as a requirement because of such testing; however, I don’t want to have to send an 8MB source package that contains mostly useless-for-the-tester code or binary data. Asking someone to get such a huge download and build a project themselves just to check it out or test it is asking too much, I think.

Since they don’t need the source to test it, I can just put together the binary files I need and send them together in a tar.gz or zip file. Or so I thought.

I stumbled upon one of the things that developers face when they are new to Gnu/Linux: shared libraries that prevent distribution of your binary files. When you distribute the source and expect people to build it usually isn’t a problem, but I don’t anticipate all of my end users being proud geeks who wouldn’t mind spending hours getting my game to work again when it was working perfectly fine previously.

I have two Gnu/Linux systems, one which runs Debian Testing, with a 2.6 kernel and GCC 4.0.2, and the other which runs Debian Stable, a 2.4 kernel, and GCC 3.3. I don’t update the latter often because I use it as a backup machine. I don’t want to accidentally introduce incompatibilities that would prevent it from working properly.

When I brought my “release” over to the other machine and tried to run it, I got the following:

./oracleseye: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Let me just say that searching for solutions to this issue is difficult. You get a lot of results that aren’t relevant. Or I did, anyway. And I knew it had to be possible. Quake 3 Arena works fine, and I’ve upgraded libstdc++ a number of times, so why can’t my own code work so nicely?

So I asked on IRC, but people who leave their clients running all day even if they aren’t there are not too helpful. I searched some more, posted a question gamedev.net, but then found the possible solution immediately after the post.

Linking libstdc++ Statically by Johan Petersson talks about the exact problem I am having and offers a solution that is easy and seems elegant.

Basically, you need to statically link to both libstdc++ AND libgcc. GCC won’t let you do one without the other. And so far it seems to work.

I managed to get my code to run on my main system, my backup system, and my work system, and I no longer have to recompile on each. It only adds 0.5MB to my download, and I may even get better results once I stop using the debug build options. I’m not sure if there is a “better” solution, but I’m pretty happy for now. Thanks, Johan!

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

Free Sounds

My friend Becky Kramer tuned me into The Freesound Project, a “collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.”

Basically, all the sounds in the project are available under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. You can creatively change a work and use the derivative work commercially or noncommercially. You could take the original and distribute it in a noncommercial way.

Sounds great to me, especially for my early projects. I’ll pay for my audio needs when I think doing so will help sell my games. For now, when I am just trying to make simple games for myself, these freely available sounds will be good enough.

Categories
Geek / Technical Marketing/Business Politics/Government

FOSS Is Not To Blame For Piracy

Linux News says Digital Rights Management Picking on the Wrong People is an article to defend Free and Open Source Software against the charges that they are the ones who promote piracy.

I was surprised to hear from someone on the Indie Gamer Forums many months ago that all of the contact he had with FOSS was with people who only wanted things for free and would pirate everything from movies to games. There is also a lot of animosity towards FOSS in the ASP newsgroups, and a few months ago there was even an article in the newsletter about how FOSS was supposedly bad for business and didn’t offer any benefits to the public.

My experience is very different. I have a friend who refuses to buy DVDs because he doesn’t want to support the media cartel and the digital restrictions management used in most DVDs. I know people who pirate games and movies, but I also know people who refuse to use anything to do with Windows. If it isn’t available, they do without. After all, if you can’t play a game on Gnu/Linux, what would be the point in pirating it? Rather than break the law to watch his own movies, my friend just decides to be very selective with his DVD purchases. Revolution OS is one of the only DVDs I know that doesn’t use stupid region encoding, something that does nothing but punish paying customers while allowing commercial piracy to still occur.

In any case, it seems to me that most people who use Free and Open Source Software are fully aware of the licensed terms under which they may use their software. They are the ones who refuse to use Windows Media Player because they would prefer that their software doesn’t change the way their computer works without them knowing about when, how, and why. You can read the WMP EULA and see that it is pretty absurd what you have to agree to allow Microsoft to do. If anyone is committing piracy, whether casual or not, it’s more likely the people who don’t realize what it is the license allows them to do. Why would FOSS supporters be part of a group of people who ignore licenses and EULAs?

Sure, there are those who don’t care about the license and just want everything to be available at no cost. Open source usually is free-as-in-beer, and so if you want freely available software, it’s definitely safer than trying to get away with copying software illegally. Still, some people are going to make illegal copies of Windows, or games, or office software, or even shareware, and it is definitely possible that those same people might support FOSS.

But what a broad paintbrush we would have if we made the assertion that FOSS users in general are the ones who will most likely copy software illegally. It really makes no sense that people who consciously use FOSS to avoid vendor lock-in or support software freedom would at the same time pirate software that was proprietary or work only on a proprietary system that they are not using.

I guess I don’t interact with enough people outside of the FOSS community. I haven’t heard of too many people who believe that we’re all criminals or out to destroy the livelihoods of software developers or that we’re just anti-Microsoft zealots, but those people exist. Somehow they “heard” or “learned” what they believe FOSS is all about. They get almost as shrill defending what they think as people do when you try to tell them that copyright infringement is not the same as “theft”, and it is probably because the two issues are so related in their minds.

Maybe it is just because it is an issue related to copyright, which is fairly complicated and even people who think they know about it can be wrong. Maybe it is because FOSS is really different; when you’re driving an automatic all your life and someone gives you a manual, you’d freak out at first because you have no idea how to drive. “Why is it so complicated?! I just want to get from point A to point B!!” Or, since a lot of you are probably geeks likes me, it’s like when you give someone vi or emacs after they have been using text editors like Notepad or Pico for years. It’s a different way to think about typing. Similarly, FOSS is a different way to think about software.

Some people dismiss FOSS for their own good reasons. They’ve at least thought about it, researched it, and come to their own conclusions. But it seems that when I do meet people who “don’t get it”, they really don’t get it. They don’t understand that Free, with a capital ‘F’, as in Freedom, is different from free, lowercase ‘f’, as in “no cost”. “But why is it such a problem to pay for it?” It isn’t! There is no problem with paying for FOSS. People can’t wrap their heads around it because of the unfortunate double-meaning of “free”.

But people for some reason have no problem making the leap from “FOSS means no cost”, however erroneous that thought is, to “FOSS means stealing software”, which is an even worse assumption. While I believe some might have an agenda and would purposely lead people astray, and some other people might honestly feel that they are fighting a good fight to defend non-FOSS, I think most people just attack what they don’t understand.

Categories
Geek / Technical

Goblet of Fire

I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I didn’t get to sleep until after 3:30AM, and I had to go to work today too. I’m dead tired.

The plot and dialogue seemed to move at a very quick pace in the beginning. I started to wonder if they purposely gave the older actors less lines. I also found that the movie deserves its PG-13 rating, and not just due to the parts with Voldemort, death, and destruction. There was quite a bit of sexual inuendo, and I felt that the movie would have fit at home in the 80s for some of the campy-ness. I mean, there is the dance scene, and Hagrid’s hands move “below the equator”, only to be moved back up by Madame Olympe Maxime. Wasn’t that right out of a movie like Revenge of the Nerds?

Not that it was bad. I really enjoyed the movie. It was both funny and disturbingly scary.