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.