the cost of open source

After a really ugly argument with a few open source pundits last night, at #maemo (log here) and  some sleepless night , it was very clear to me:

1) Open source might be free as in speech, but its not free as in beer.

You should be grateful we opened the source and released it with no cost to you. We have bills to pay and programming costs us money. If you dont like the way we do,  do it yourself, son.  My code is organized the way I want it to be, in a way it saves me more time.

2) There is NO RIGHT OR WRONG way to do it.

This is a derivative from the first, but in my work hours, I have a coding convention to follow and in my spare time, I want to break free from it. So,  I do it the way it pleases me more and the way I belive its the most efficient. In fact, I have seen some evidences it allows the compiler to optimize it better.

3) Discouraging and bullying the community is the wrong way to mantain knowledge.

You might think my code is dificult to mantain, but thats not whats important. Whats important is the knowledge behind it.

The more you try to impose rules and standards, the least code and knowledge transmission you have.  There’s already a deep shortage in game programming documentation. More and more people start to rely on OpenGL is less people learn how to actually make a OpenGL. Its not me saying this: its them!

There’s a nice little text you should read: Its called The Cathedral and the Bazaar: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

You’re basicly being a Mussolini. (Godwin? WOOOOSH!)

4) Sometimes, diferent constraints require diferent approaches.

Have you noticed there is little to no 3D games other than Doom, Quake and Descent for Maemo?  Thats becouse its FUCKING HARD to develop it. And I dont get a single penny out of it. If I say EZX is hard to develop to, belive-me, it is!

5) “if you wrote your code correctly, you wouldn’t use an SDK even if it was available”

Thats in your perfect world where everything is dont the right way? Let me tell you some news: there is no such a thing. If it was so perfect, there wouldnt be projects like OpenEZX , that is actually trying to do it the right way.

6) If Im so angry, why dont I just close the source?

See 3, but followers already know about newbiew_x11’s cool WIP engine. It uses a lot of BZK code.

7) But the code @ SVN is not ready to use!

The project is about a toolset, not a game. Angstron 2 is supplied as a example implementation.

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While man_in_shack had some points, Luke-Jr pretty much bitched becouse Im not John Carmack. Sorry about that, but you arent him either. In fact, he bitched without showing a single line of code made into a product.