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

[Loic Dachary]

 > 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.

        It may be true, I have no opinion on artistic work licensing. 

 > -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.

        I would not call this reason "ideological" but "practical
advantage" or something like that.  The ideological reason is that
Free Software is the only ethical way to distribute
programs. Distributing proprietary software is moraly flawed, no
matter what. When Olivier Lejade (Nevrax founder) decided for Free
Software, the ideological reason was very clear in his mind.

 > -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.

        It may be true but I would not bet on it. Free Software is
certainly a marketing asset. But you will need to work to get
advantage of it. As an example, I consider that NeL is in many ways
technically superior to crystalspace. Yet, NeL is not well known and
crystalspace is very well know. Both are Free Software but one did a
better job than the other at marketing itself in the Free Software
community. 

 > -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.

        This is what every Free Software is trying to reach. But
that's not a competitive advantage in itself since every competitor
benefit from the same technology. Yet, the game industry is so
peculiar that it may be, for a while, a competitive advantage. Free
Software is remarkably ignored by the game industry at large. It may
very well be the case that a Free Software middleware vastly
outperforms all existing proprietary middleware and that the game
industry needs a year or two to figure this out ;-)

 > 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 ;-)

        ;-) As I said before I'm unable to discuss this topic because
I know too little about it.

 > I'm very interested in your arguments why not protecting your brand
 > would be bad idea? 

        Nevrax would probably be quite unhappy if someone forbids them
to use the word Ryzom after spending lots of time, efforts and money
in a marketing campaign to promote ... Ryzom ;-)

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
12 bd  Magenta         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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