Open Source World Project
From Multiverse
Contents |
Goals
The Multiverse Open Source World (OSW) is intended to be an organized community effort to develop a working virtual world based on the Multiverse platform built by the Multiverse developer community, for training/educational purposes and for the general benefit of the community. The effort will spur the development of new components for the Multiverse platform, foster investigation and learning of the platform, and ultimately build a "live" world as part of the Network.
This page will serve as an evolving blueprint for the project.
Team
Right now, this is just an informal list of people who are interested in being involved. Later, it may evolve into something a bit more formal.
Developer community:
- LuckyWolf (Scott Peal) - Project Manager
- Hamilton (Patrick Hamilton) - Unassigned
- Ferlin (Ferlin Scarborough) - Unassigned
Multiverse
- c.rand (Rand McKinney)
Title Definitions:
World Coordinator- To keep the project going and on track. To look at concepts and present to the core council for decision. To finalize ideas and structure steps to complete the project. To offer final decisions on world change and growth. The World Coordinator will work with the creation team to gather ideas for world development.
Core Council - A select group of individuals who oversee the project and make decisions on world creation and direction from concepts given to them by the World Coordinator. The Project Manager will be part of the Core Council and head of discussion and organization.
Creation Team - Those who contribute to the world with art, music, sound effects, world building, concepts, programming and writing. Writing would include quests, backgrounds, editing world information for grammar, spelling and clarity.
Issues
- Where will project be hosted? Sourceforge
- Project management is hosted at http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensourceworld/
- Production server is located at GoDaddy with a domain name of IV3.org
- What license will the project use? (See below.)
- How will the project be managed? Ron has suggested a three person guiding board, to serve 6 month terms. Presumably, the board would designate "committers" for the project.
- Need to create a OSW Developer Guidelines document.
License
The java.net "Choose a License" page discusses the differences between the licenses currently available at the site. Some highlights:
- BSD is the most appropriate choice if you want people to use your code in whatever way they like. It is important to keep in mind that this might mean "closing" it and selling it, thus profiting from your work.
- The Apache license is a little stricter than BSD and protects developers from patent litigation from other developers or contributors, but does not prevent your work from being incorporated into proprietary software, even in modified form.
- The Mozilla Public License (MPL) and the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) are quite similar in some aspects (such as in requiring modifications to the original code to be published under the same terms), but LGPL is more restrictive, since it grants users the permission to reverse-engineer applications using the library in order to allow changes made to a modified version of the library to be debugged. In many (if not most) countries, there is actually no legal way of preventing a user from reverse-engineering software (except for malicious purposes), but even so, this fact tends to scare a number of managers and legal departments. There are other differences between the licenses, but LGPL is a better choice if the library might be combined with GPL software in the future.
- The General Public License (GPL) is a good choice if you want your code to be "free" forever. However, note that everyone using your code as part of his or her work will need to distribute the new code base under GPL as well. That is why it is said to be a viral license, but also it is why it will keep your code free forever. Whether that is an excellent or a terrible thing is up to the reader to decide.
If there is no strong reason against it, it is usually a good idea to license your open source project under the same license used by the other libraries it depends upon. This will be very helpful if you ever need to modify the code of a third-party library in order to fix a bug or to implement an enhancement.
