Campaign Review of BoW

In the course of Open Source Management our team members had to write a review of the other team’s campaign.

First of all, I had a lot of trouble installing their campaign which resulted in numerous error dialogs. At first I thought this was because I use a rather “special” OS system – Windows 7 64-bit in Estonian. Also, like in the classroom in TLU, I installed the beta version of BoW to my system. Therefore at first I tried looking into the main configuration file to create some workaround.

Later on my team members all shared in Skype the same problems and offered a solution – to install BoW stable version. As for them, this helped me also.

The campaign was about a some sort of mobster, that terrorized the villages around him (collecting roof-money etc.).

I have to admit that I am bad at non-real-time-strategy games, therefore maybe the level “easy” that the team had made, was still difficult for me.

This was because I tried to kill all the soldiers that attacked me, but later on I understood that I had to kill the nemesis up north. This wasn’t said in the scenario introduction (simply collect the villages). So I had a whole interesting hour trying to get to the second level.

Now, thanks to the help from Ott, I managed to reach to the second level. I have to stress out, that there should be always a re-birth limit for the bad guys. Some reality should be implemented.

The second scenario was again different than described. My old strategy of killing the enemy or quickly escaping towards the goal-point didn’t give me success.

On the third scenario my limited play-skills ended, because I just got constantly killed. So sadly I can’t report anything else.

I’d like to state out that for example when playing my all time favorite Wolfenstein, when you select the level easy, it really is easy, and you could kill your opponents simply by “wearing them out”. Ok that is a little bit of lie.

So at the end, I’d like to say, that although the campaigns were made very creatively (I liked that the units images were imported, not used the inbuilt one’s), I had a somewhat half-made feeling towards the scenarios when playing the campaign.

But great creativity and I only wish, that someone from the community would continue to generate a campaign with more elaborate and storyline’d content.

Case of Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow to me was an unknown name before the OSM course. As I understand the man stands out by writing his novels etc. under the Creative Commons license, meaning that anybody can download, print etc. his works as long as the user doesn’t disrupt the CC laws.

Question in mind is however now – can the man survive or even prosper with this type of business model (or rather principle).

To answer that question, I’d like to elaborate my views on the current state of intellectual property in the world.

There is an abundance of it. Every man, girl and ape is producing music, films and text by its laptop, often designing the end-product to be as merchandisable as Fox or Sony publishing firms would make it.

That leads me to question, what is the difference between the two type of business-doing? Answer – the latter is more expensive.

So yes – Cory Doctorow is doing smart move, promoting and acting under Creative Commons, as he has now more space (possession) of public knowledge than the thousands of other writers acting by the traditional ways.

The multitude of free collaborative channels offered to artist today in all greatly raises the question of “what is the point of using old methods of doing business in the entertainment sector”. Music videos that costs millions, and are published later on MTV – pointless. Just mash something up on youtube. Recording that see hundreds of studio time put into them – pointless. No consumer has the time to truly enjoy the perks. Just publish something often and fast on iTunes. etc.

So in conclusion, it is still unclear to me how Cory Doctorow will become a millionaire by writing novels, but if money is not an object, the man has reached (or reaching) every other goal intended.

BoW Review

Battle of Wesnoth as a game is not so new to me. Although I hadn’t played the specific one yet, I do have a multitude of favourites in the real time strategy field, whether it be Age Of Empires (best franchise ever!), Age of Mythology series or some Star Wars RTS games.

What is new to me however, is the campaign creating. When I played AoE, I many times wanted to create my own campaigns, but I can’t remember currently why I didn’t. Maybe there are some limitations (after all – not a open source game.. khm Microsoft :D) or I just didn’t have enough time.

However what I did do, was map creating. At one time a had an identical map of Hiiumaa in AoE not to mention the many battles over Peipsi Lake, which I created and repeatedly bullied eastern-neighbors.

Although BoW is not exactly eye-candy compared to AoE, the bigger upset for me is the step-by-step gaming. I am used to real-time action, meaning the troops move and engage in battles like in real-life, but as in BoW the battles are more do-si-do, meaning hit by hit.

All in all I have to say still, that it’s a great accomplishment for a voluntary community.

I post a little picture of my lost battle too (sadly there were many :)) -

Open Source Beneficiaries

Following I’ll post an insight to three IT-companies that are using open source as part of their business strategy and are greatly benefiting from it.

MindTouch
http://www.mindtouch.com/

An interesting little it-tiger. The company offers collaboration platform for firms, gaining its revenue from segmenting its product line. Basically its sells its products but maintains the ability for a free download of its CORE product.

MindTouch has been currently stated to own the third place in communication platforms, right after IBM and Microsoft.

More information:
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:ls5NnWgualUJ:news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10282668-16.html+companies+benefiting+from+open+source&cd=3&hl=et&ct=clnk&gl=ee

Sun Microsystems
Company known to many. Although today Sun is under Oracle, who bought the firm, many believe that Sun’s successful open source products like OpenOffice and MySQL will continue to boost, even under new management.

More information:
http://www.ostatic.org/blog/recession-a-boon-for-open-source

Asterisk
http://www.asterisk.org/

Linux for VoiP. The company offers a call-center like software platform for firms of different sizes, gaining its revenue from support and training features.

More information:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2006/tc20060707_042679.htm

PS: Symbian
Although this news is “fresh out of the oven”, Symbian is implementing Open Source to its development also.

More information:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9975902-16.html

Copyleft in Deep

Copyleft to me is the opposition of copyright. So whatever comes to a common user's mind when thinking about copyright (acquisition price, closed source code, unavailability of sharing etc.), they should think the opposite when keeping copyleft in mind.


To me, copyleft classifies itself to three categories, each represented by different licenses:

1. GNU General Public License

The best of the best. Main idea is, that the freedom of the user overpowers the freedom of the developer. Whatever the developer produces, he or she has to keep in mind, that when the product one develops or re-develops is published under GPL, no form of restrictions can be made to the products source code (essence) or usage (price, geographical or even linguistic peculiarities).

Software released under GPL that is familiar to me, is for example CDex, which is a cd-ripping tool I use to digitalize my old cd's for easy listening.

2. GNU Lesser General Public License (alternative option: Mozilla Public License)

Middle-ground for the collision of GPL and BSD-like schools-of-thought. As I understand, LGPL means, that the product under development has to follow GPL principles (the good), but all the products used for the making of this under-construction product do NOT have to be GPL-implemented. Could this mean, that saome sort of e-mail arranger could be released under LGPL for Microsoft Outlook. Appears so?! Also one can use LGPL software commercially, as long as all the LGPL material and it's developments remain licensed under LGPL.

One of the most famous products using LGPL is ofcourse 7-Zip which is by far the greatest file-packer in the world. A great overview of the principles of LGPL is given by 7-zip site's developer FAQ - http://www.7-zip.org/faq.html.

3. BSD license (with multitude of alternatives)


New type of copyright for the open-source community. To me it seems to be a very simplistic way of intellectual property protection, only stating that the:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
      documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
    * Neither the name of the  nor the
      names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
      derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

So BSD itself doesn't say anything about the neccessity to keep the source code open and freely usable for the community.

Examples of software released under BSD are many, the most famous one being FreeBSD.

FSF Compared to OSI

To start with, both of these organizations were new to me. As I understood, the main difference between the two were that one promotes free software and freedom in software all together and the other organization promotes open source as such.

By many lectures by now I and hopefully this blog's readers have come to a conclusion that FREEWARE is intellectual property (software) that is being given away with no monetary costs to the (retail) consumer TODAY.

On the other side - OPEN SOURCE is intellectual property (eg. software), that is created and developed BY the consumers FOR the consumers, usually with no monetary costs. Exceptions can come, when for example the property is developed by paid personnel, not the consumers itself.

The only thing the two have in common, is the monetary similarity that is occasional - no costs for the consumer.

This is apparent in the comparison between the two organizations: FSF and OSI. While FSF thoroughly fights for the retail consumer's right for free software and the protection of one's privacy (EDIT: NOT ONLY), OSI actually plays on a whole different playground. OSI states its mission as for the wide-spread of open-source programming in the world (http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd).

So to me the two are nothing alike, as FSF does the ungrateful business of promoting the idea of free software and consumer privacy protection (EDIT: NOT ONLY), OSI on the other hand is a sort of institution like IEEE etc. which promotes a certain type of development culture.


EDIT:
As I found out, the extent of which the FSF supports free software as such is far more greater than just "pushing" freeware. FSF sees the software as not only free to consume, but free to edit, share or anything else imaginable. Freeware in fact is totally irrelevant in the case of FSF, but rather FREE SOFTWARE should be used. I myself and I guess many new-comers also at first would see the sign FREE as a term commenting the potential product's missing monetary costs. But as Kaido Kikkas has stated in his lectures - the pricing is just the tip of the iceberg and in the case of FSF free means a whole new scope of things, mainly agitating the belief that there cannot be NO property when it comes to knowledge (products) that are produced using our brains. And if there cannot be no property, then all the means to control it are futile. Hence FREE software.


http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.opensource.org/