I found the game & it's spin-off "Robo Blast Kart" like 6 years ago? The Kart game is SUPER fun & honestly better than official Mario Kart games. I didn't know the original game is 25 years old?? Incredible
- it is very nearly perfect, but has some minor issues especially in regards to the strength of frontrunning (early leads tend to become unbeatable)
- the development team has mostly abandoned it in favor of the sequel, which completely abandons the brilliant simplicity of SRB2K
- the development team kind of take a rude approach to the GPL. They don't really accept PRs from the community, and work in secrecy rather than out in the open. They still publish their work, so they comply with the license, but it's a bit lame
- The modding community is super weird about reusing other people's code and will pitch a fit if you get caught reusing someone's lua script without their permission.
It's not rude to the GPL, it's just not collaborative in a way you want them to be?
The four freedoms allow you to share your enhancements with the community, they don't say the original author has to accept them. They pursue their own vision for the software, they give you all the sources and license you need to pursue a different direction.
Stallman has also talked about how "works of art" (pictures, stories, music) are different from "functional" works (software, recipes, typefaces, etc.). He thinks that nonfree "functional" works are unethical, but is ok with a modest copyright time limit before being permitted to remix/modify art:
> But eventually I realized that modifying a work of art can be a contribution to art, but it's not desperately urgent in most cases. If you had to wait ten years for the copyright to expire, you could wait that long
With that in mind, he'd want game code to be published under a free software license, but would be ok if the "art" of the game remained briefly copyrighted. Probably not what modders want to hear!
I don't blame any project that does work in private and doesn't accept community PRs.
Being open to the community isn't unilateral upside. It comes with huge trade-offs especially the more toxic and opinionated and bikesheddy and entitled the community is. Sometimes you have a vision you want to execute without dealing with egos and emotions in PR comments and without people who have entitled themself some sort of weird ownership of the project because it's small.
Elm's creator has some talks on this. But it's also an experience I have in any project that has traction.
Kart Krew accepts patches from outsiders. I've found the community to be quite collaborative.
I'm an outsider and I've gotten a few patches accepted to Ring Racers, like this small screenshot bugfix[1], or this more complicated rework of camera momentum to make "look behind you" work better[2].
One dev gave an initial cursory review of [2] within 36h, and the project leader chose to merge my change within a couple of months. By OSS standards, this is shockingly fast. (I suspect I got lucky - the project usually moves much slower.)
Kart Krew is more secretive when it comes to the non-public "in-development" branch, but I think this is because the core team is more tight-knit and wants to keep a smaller audience for their more invasive gameplay vision/experiments. (I don't have access to this branch, but most PRs don't need it)
I do find it odd how modders have such a different culture about programming than regular developers. Like I know mods for Skyrim or whatever are always involved in crazy feuds about even things like modlists (some people are very opposed to something that would automatically install mods for example).
I wonder if it's just an age thing or something else?
It's not, the same thing happened even in the 1980s and 1990s. Think of it like "stolen valour".
Let's say you enjoy Skyrim. All the people are like "Yay Bethesda!". Bethesda gets the warm fuzzies (and lots of money)
Then PERSON X introduces the HORSE ARMOUR mod. All the people are like "Yay PERSON X!". PERSON X gets the warm fuzzies, and this keeps them going. To get the mod, you have to go to PERSON X's page on nexus, read their spiel, download their file, read their README, install it just right, and so on. That's a lot of time the masses are spending with PERSON X because... they changed a piece of Bethesda's game.
Now PERSON Y introduces the PERSON Y's MEGAPACK mod, which combines multiple mods and makes sure they work together. PERSON X's HORSE ARMOUR mod is just a single bulletpoint on the list, along with hundreds of others. They are mere datapoints, what's important is PERSON Y, because PERSON Y made sure all these other modders' stuff worked together, and used their taste and discernment to decide what was worth including or not. All praise now goes to PERSON Y. PERSON Y gets the warm fuzzies while PERSON X gets the cold pricklies. Boo!
Now do you see why PERSON X doesn't like PERSON Y's modlists.... for Bethesda's game?
A side piece about who's "stealing" from who in the 1990s demo and piracy scene, which cracks games and makes painstakingly pixellated copies of famous artworks: https://www.datagubbe.se/scenecop/
For anyone interested in this debate about working in 'secrecy' vs 'out in the open', this is the subject of the 1997 essay (and later book) "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond, comparing the classic free software development models vs the model used by the Linux kernel.
Interesting really, I was never really in the community that much it was mostly me & my siblings playing the game for fun! But that's unfortunate to hear .. never heard of the sequel as well will check it out soon.
