[Nel] Would a complete gpl'ed and copylefted online gaming world be financialy s

[Marc De Mesel]

Dear Loïc,

The reasons why the nevrax team decided to make a gpl'ed engine are of no 
difference of the reasons and advantages I can come up with when thinking 
about gpl'ing my art as well as my brandname. I seems to me that licensing 
your art and trademark as gpl gives you the same extra advantages that you 
get when gpl'ing your engine.

Here goes the reasoning:

What are the advantages of creating a gpl'ed engine, what were the reasons 
the nevrax team chose to do that (correct me if I'm wrong here):

-ideoligical, we think making the engine available to the community will 
accelerate the production of fantastic online worlds in general. ( because 
if the necesary technology to make such an online worlds is easily available 
to be used without restrictions, more people will be able to make graphical 
online worlds. You will get more variation and thus higher quality which 
will draw more public to the online worlds in general. Advantage to nevrax: 
Since online worlds is nevrax's future business they will prosper from a 
bigger audience interested in new online worlds.

-marketing, people will get to know our project (Ryzom) better thanks to the 
attention their gpl'ed mmorpg engine gets, so probably more subscribers to 
their Ryzom world than if they would not take the decision to gpl the 
engine.

-future competetive advantage, since other people will use the engine they 
will probably make him better too so that we for our next project will have 
the best engine available, and will be able to do the most with it as we 
understand the engine and his possibilities the best.

So what would happen if you gpl'ed your artwork and trademark too? What are 
the advantages of doing that?

Well, suppose I'm creating a world called 'BoogieBoogieLand' populated by 
boogie boogies, you play one, you have a complete, open ended city life in 
boogie boogie land comparable to the sims online. Now firstly why would I do 
this, licencing the art and trademark as gpl?

-ideological, gamedevelopers will be able to even more simply, as they have 
everything rightly available, make games. There will pop-up more variations 
of boogie boogie lands. The market for interested boogie boogie gamers will 
be broadened as there are more different boogie boogie games and worlds 
available. The brand will become big without me putting that much affort in 
it. If we, the original boogie boogie land, creators, keeps up with the 
market and incorporates good things from others into our world than I will 
prosper from the bigger market that has been created. Ofcourse I can't stand 
still as then I would fastly be outcompeted by others.

-marketing, I will defenetly get some extra attention from the 
gamedevelopers community as they are interested in a business model that 
works with an online world, completely gpl'ed. This would give my boogie 
boogie world, when launching the servers, some extra interest, more gamers. 
(ofcourse the game will have to be good but the start, the necesary exposure 
will be more easy to get.)

-Future competitive advantage, as mentioned above, since the gpl obligates 
others to gpl their work too I can always incorporate changes they made to 
their boogie boogie world that proves to be good. Since I'm the original 
creator, I'll understand the world the best and thus will be able to take 
the most advantage of the whole boogie boogie developers community their 
efforts in making interesting things with the brand.


One thing that people have problems with  when thinking of gpl'ed artwork or 
trademarks is 'but what if people use your trademark r art for things that 
you do not agree with and that will hurt the reputation of your mark or 
artwork?'

I don't know, I wouldn't probably like it, but hey, no gain without any 
pain, meaning, you can't have positive surprises without having negatives 
from time to time. But I do love surprises! And gpl'ing the complete world 
allows for nice surprises and big fights! hm lovely ;-)

I'm very interested in your arguments why not protecting your brand would be 
 bad idea? Are their any examples of people having consciously chosen to 
make a film, a book, a picture, a drawing, a piece of music, in short a 
personal piece of art, copylefted? And what were the results?

I think that if George Lucas would have made his star wars brand gpl'ed 
than, yes maybe he wouldn't have earned that much money but you defenetely 
would have higher quality movies and games and whatever people come up with.

Point is, why wouldn't you allow people to build on your work. There ain't 
much difference between the so called 'art' and the functional art that you 
call software. It's all vision. And it can be all functional, at least if 
you CAN build on it.

cheers,

MarcDM



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