Thanks everyone for your feedback! This thread got busy quickly (yay! I hoped this would spark a good discussion), so I'm going to just reply/respond all at once. I'll be cutting quotes short, so if you haven't read the whole thread you might not get the whole context. No TL;DR this time, sorry.
OtLand has a lot of leeches who are completely ungrateful for even the slightest thing that could benefit their server the tiniest.
The only reason it isn't like that is that the community now has changed a lot. They only want to make money with other peoples work, that's why there are less open-source programs. If the community was different, if the community was helping the developer, finding bugs, testing, donating etcetera, there would be more open-source programs. The main perpetrator is the community.
From what I've seen, I think I would agree with this. Maybe a forum where developers could collaborate together, like devs helping devs. I'm not sure what the best way to keep it just devs is though. Maybe just a place where we can point to our Github projects and have meta discussions? If you can put any code on Github (even if you think it sucks), you deserve to come and chat with me.
I initially closed the source of RME because I couldn't be bothered to maintain the public repository. There was never any contribution back to the repository ... so it gave me nothing. And thinking about publishing all commits is some extra work that takes time ... There is really nothing to be gained, neither in the way of appreciation or in monetary value by having them open source ... There are simple not the abundance of developers necessary to contribute anyways so you will get nothing back by doing it.
Actually, it's probably because the "end game" in OT is always to make your own, awesome server. That inherently includes keeping secrets of how it works, which trickles down to the tools as well. Implementing a perfect skull / party system is ... a huge boon to your server.
I agree that it takes a lot of effort (mental and otherwise) to mange an open source project (I have quite a few in the web CMS market), especially if it appears no one is interested in giving back. If you're releasing your software for free anyway, why not release the code as well? There may not be enough developers now, but if you keep it closed source you guarantee you'll never get contributions. If you want to sell your tools, I have nothing against that (even if I think you could still keep it open source) but I've seen a lot of free, closed source tools. This is the category I'd like to change.
[When you have closed source tools] the problem with this is it sets a dangerous precedent. Since most tools are closed source, new contributors will make their tools closed source to maintain the 'culture'. This attitude predated me closing the RME sources by years (SimOne's editor was closed source, as was many of the tools like BlackDemon dat editor et. al.) but I realize I maintain it. I would like to open source the map editor but since I've added some stuff I do not want to be public (relating to games I've developed myself) I will need to clean the sources up, something I do not have the time for at the moment
.
This is the main reason I wanted to start this topic. If we're just fostering "monkey see, monkey do" then I'd love to see the community (of devs) start to encourage contributors to open source their work. Thanks for your thoughts @Remere, I'm sure your reply is a large reason this topic is popular. I certainly wasn't trying to blame you, just the example that came to mind.
the reason why my Spr/Dat editor isn't open source is because I don't want people to see my crappy coding xD
This is my biggest fear as well, primarily the main reason I didn't release the Colossus and a few other scripts. I don't want some [one] to come in and ... correcting my code ... I would love to help out with some stuff, I'm just afraid to screw up stuff.
I felt the same way when I got started, but
you are not your code! There are some bad apples out there but all the developers I've met recognize what it takes to put yourself out there like that (because we've all been there). Every day I look at code I've written in the past and curse myself for being so dumb, but that's because I'm learning something new every day. C++ and compiled GUIs are not my strong suit, and I'd love to see how a self-proclaimed novice (but I'm even more of one) works through the same problems I am. We can all learn together! (alright, that's enough cheezyness)
I have also created tutorials for several things and I don't mind making more. If I get the time, I will make tutorials. I have a lot of fun creating them, it makes me feel like I'm giving back to the community and hoping people will take up on it and give back to the community as well.
IMHO this is just a good as releasing code or submitting a patch. An unfortunate staple of open source projects are their lack of good documentation so anything that helps in that category is greatly appreciated (at least by me, I'm sure others agree).
I agree with the thread starter, and there will be an announcement in the coming weeks about huge changes to OtLand that is intended to address these flaws in the community. Running ShadowCores has helped me find a lot of bugs and bad code in TFS, which I've fixed and released for free to people who are running servers without even putting 10% of the effort I put into ShadowCores on their servers.
Thanks for the heads up, looking forward to the announcement and thanks for your hard work!
@topic
Actions can speak louder than words so I'll put my (pretty bad) code on github this weekend. I've been playing around with a Tibia.spr viewer as a web site/service, and it actually works (kind of
). Maybe this will morph into a Tibia.dat reader/writer as well? Maybe a [WebGL] map editor? I'm scratching my own itch here with these technologies, we'll see if anything comes of it. We (small group of IRL friends) had an OT back in the 7.4 days (YurOTS, called Valinor) and we had so much fun then we're having a go at it again. We couldn't have done it with the work of too many people to name, so I'm really focused on giving back this time around.
