Leslie Da Bass - Kassatshekk

Spämmijast otseturustajaks » Luiga Mody Hääl Borenius

Spämmijast otseturustajaks » Luiga Mody Hääl Borenius

The validity of Cory Doctorow's business model

Cory Doctorow is a writer and blogger who writes stories in different magazines and also edits famous weblog Boing Boing. He is known as an activist in liberizing the copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization. He is also known by publishing his books in Internet under Creative Commons licenses. His first book published in 2003 under CC was "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". Many of he's books are published under NonCommercial + ShareAlike combo license, which means all noncommercial derivatives with author attribution can be distributed under license identical to the work. All of he's novels after 2003 are published with CC license, but all of the licenses are noncommercial.

So where the money comes?

I guess, that Cory Doctorow is using CC noncommercial licensing method to get wide distribution of his books. Along with the mass distribution also comes good notoriety. The idea to allow readers to share the book by themselves is giving him an advantage not to pay for distribution at all. He has gained lot of fame with this method and many people know he's books and review them online, which also affects the sales of hard copy books in bookstores. He is using the most widely spread online strategy in his publishing business, give digitally free and sell hard copies. Most of the money comes from donations and sales of the hard copies all over the Internet.

My Role in Wesnoth participation team

I was arranged to write a WML code in Red team. There were lot of problems in the start. As I am not a programmer and don't know much of it, my plan was to learn the logic of the existing projects and try to understand it. So I took some projects and changed their maps, scenarios units etc. and ended up with game crash several times. From there we were stuck with our team and I had an idea to start from scratch and try to build it step by step. We were succeeding more and more with this approach and ended up with working campain consist 4 scenarios. I was helped by Maarja, Jakob and Elise and we were constantly programming it many many evenings. Finally we undestood the logic of the code and the structure. We found that asking questions from Westnoth chatroom is the quickest way to get solution to the coding problems.

Blue team - Wesnoth campaign review

For the first, I had troubles with starting the game. I got all the game date from SVN and tried to run it. As we understood in developing wesnoth campaign, that campaign data has to be copied under My Games folder, but with this version it didn't work, so I was forced to try copy it under game source files. After doing so I still got weird map loading error:


So I could not start the game at all...
Then I noticed that the blue team campaign was written for beeta version (shame).
So I downloaded beeta and installed it to another location and tried to run the game again.
And I succeeded this time, and got it working.

The team has put lot of effort in creating the Campaign texts and story. The story is nicely described and creates interest to play it.

In first scenario I really liked that you had to find the path through the woods. I also liked the autorecruit, and I wonder how it is coded. I was asked to find the path in this scenario. I really found it is frustrating just putting your characters to move forward. So i didn't much first scenario. Finally I made it to the end in somekind of a little town. The map was nicely designed though!

In second scenario I need to found elven allie to win enemy. I explored map with the scrappy and finally found the elven allie. Though I couldn't move the elf and my chars scrappy and icky were killed, and I need to start over.

Next time I already knew how to play first scenario, so it was quick and easy.
So I reached the second level again, but never finished the game, I couldn't move the elf again...

For the comment I have to say, that game design, map design and story were really good, but I didn't like the understandment with the characters so I couldn't finish the game.

History of new media

http://lizard.artun.ee/~raivo/imke2010

http://lizard.artun.ee/~raivo/imke2010/presentations/priidu_tammeorg.pdf

Open source as business strategy

Many companies are using open source as their business strategy. This is not just giving software away free, but knowing where your outcome is. The best example is dual licensing which is very often done for supporting free software business models. With dual licensing company can sell porprietary software license which allows creating proprietary applications and in the same time can provide also free license with copyleft free or open source license with the requirement the derived work has to be released under the same license. Good example is MySQL Community Edition is available under the GNU license, but there is also MySQL Enterprise which is commercial version and with more possibilities and extra services.

One idea of open source strategy is to go to market with new piece of software by giving this away for free and win customers more easily and grow more easily. By giving this away for free they create unique dependance among their users and with the time users don't even notice that they need this software. Good example is PHP framework Symphony which has fastly growing network of developers creating new plugins and functions for this framework. They also offer Doctrine as ORM for their framework, which is also very fastly growing free ORM. They earn money selling the how to books and trainings, they also have donate, which most of the free software communities use.

My Favourite is Magento open source eCommerce platform, which is using dual licensing way. Magentos community edition is using OSL 3.0 license and Magento enterprise edition is commercially licensed. The latter is more comprehensive and has more possibilities than free edition. There are also widely offered extensions, some of them are free and some commercial.

Copyleft licensing and its usage

Copyleft is ment for supporting the copyright laws by removing the copyright restrictions from the work for distributing and modifing the work with the requirement to retain the same rights for the works are created from the original work.

It is meant for modifying copyrights for works as music, art, documents and computer software.
Basically autor of the work can prohibit other people by reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of his work, but author can give permission to distribute the copies of the work to reproduce the work with the same copyleft licensing scheme. With computer software, example is open source copyleft license which requires to show information about creator of the software and include the the source code.

Using copyleft person can codify his work with the license. Licensing can be either none, weak or strong. Many free software licenses are none copyleft licenses and are not requireing licensee to distribute the software under the same license, and makeing it widely possible to use in proprietary software. For example if you choose a none copyleft license for your software project, your code will possibly spread very quickly if its good enough. Many companies will be interested in it, if they can integrate this to their software. What you get is recognition and maybe become a new standard but, companies who are using you code are getting the profit. Good examples are Apache webserver license and X11.

Weak copyleft like LGPL is mostly used for creating software libraries, because it allowes other software to link to the library and redistribute it without legal issues. For example if you software project is using a weak copyleft license, then possibly your software is adopted by other software companies, because the license allows them to use your software together with theirs. It also means that they can make revenue from the code they develop on the codebase you are giving away free. Good example from weak copyleft licensing is C standard library.

Strong copyleft license such as GNU GPL means that all source code modifications, additions, or derivatives must use the same GPL license. For example if your software uses a strong copyleft license, then companies who are wanting to earn profit from your sourecode don't want to use your code as their connected to your original code, because there could be many conflicts with GPL license. This is the main reason why many companies are not allowing to use GPL in their projects.

Wesnoth - game review

I am very big fan of strategy games. My first experience with Civilization 1. There from I am very found of strategy games and tried to play lot of them. Wesnoth package is small and quick to download and install. It has Estonian language support and is being developed under GNU GPL licence which means that Wesnoth is free software. Wesnoth is turn based game, like Civilization and played on the map. There are different units in the game with their strenghts and weaknesses. Unit strenght is also dependant on the terrain type it is standing on. It shows the % of terrain defence if you want to move your unit there. Units are gaining more strenght if they survive the battle - gain more experience and become stronger. I really like the game core idea and the race segmentation to bad and good. I tried to play good part and was going through various campains. The graphics are not very good, but is not the big issue, though the campaigns are interesting and free to download from the internet. The game is really easy to learn has lots of campaigns to play.
One thing I would like developers to add is to move all objects by selecting them with mouse. That will reduce time of play a lot.

Free and open source software comparsion

So what differs open source software from free software. Open source software is basically same than free software. The difference comes from restrictions in licencing. Free software is totaly free for distribution, copy, modify etc. Open source has it's restrictions in modify and redistributions and accepts more restrictive licences than free software and doesn't accept some free software licences. But more or less the differences are small and almoust all open source is free software and nearly all free software is open source.

Ambiguity of the word free software has raised many questions. Many people have tried to find proper definition to free and open source software and there comes the different understanding of these two schools of thought. Free software developers think that open source software is more meant for corporations. Companies fear the word free, for them it usually means it's buggy and not working and not effiecent and profitable. They tend to go for open source which is more built for business. They think that with open source they can get better quality, because its vendor locked-in type of software. Free software developers think that many software developing companies are using "open source" termin with their PR tricks to sell their software more easily. Some people think that free software thinking is like communist thinking, they tend to see collectivic thinking and problems with no ownership is allowed, but more people think it is liberal movement and is very good for economy.