Free Game Alliance

Hey everyone, just a quick update here:

We're happy to announce that we're supporting the Free Game Alliance An initiative started to promote collaborative game development and open source.

The Free Game Alliance (FGA) is a great collection of Open Source games, one per genre, which will keep you busy for years to come. What do you need more than a good FPS, a good turn-based strategy game, a good real time strategy game, a good mmorpg and a good car racing game? Probably nothing if the content is updated regularly enough!! That's why the FGA wants to support these projects and make them become known and famous, so more developers and contributors can join them to make this the perfect set of constantly evolving games!

Check out their website at http://www.freegamealliance.com/, and make sure to check out the other FOSS games there ^_^

See the blog post here

Interesting, never heard from them before!

Just one per genre? That's a mistake... I mean, look at the divergence in preferences... some people prefer quake movement, some like Warsow's, some like ours...

...and I'm not even going to touch on weapon balances


Also the video on the page is not recent at all; there's more recent stuff on youtube than that.

True. Someone should upload a gameplay vid (from the new release), which should also have a cleaner HUD and a smaller crosshair than in this current vid (Mirio prob. made it since only he plays with such a huge crosshair ).

It's really an old video by me (0.1).
This site is "meh" anyway. :/

huh. I'm surprised 0ad isn't up there.

I also agree that limiting themselves to 1 game per genre is a bad idea, since different games within a genre can be radically different.

oh yeah, urban terror too.

Not to mention Hedgewars for turn based games. It's a very good one. Why not show more than one game?

Urban terror isn't going to be Open Source after next release. Idk if that still allows them to be qualified for the site

Definitely endorse this movement, keep it up!! (Can we make a directory of open source games though?)

Glest looks *and plays* like a bad joke compared to some Spring games, notably 0K.

@detamina: http://happypenguin.org -> Advanced Search -> Source Available: yes.

I'm not so sure about PlaneShift. I guess their proprietary license only applies to game data, but this condition irks me:

You may use the provided Material, for personal use only, to connect to an Official PlaneShift Server only in conjunction with a Planeshift Client, distributed by Atomic Blue. Official PlaneShift Servers can only be designated by Atomic Blue.

So, basically, they're saying in that license that you may not use the nonfree game data under this license using any client which you built yourself. I suppose this is intended to fight cheating, but it's an incredibly bizarre way to do so via a nonfree license of the game data, using that wording; Ryzom puts in its terms for using their servers that you can't use a modified client, which makes a lot more sense than saying you can't use the game data with a client not distributed by the developers.

The PlaneShift developers say here that one of the key reasons for making the game data nonfree is to prevent forks, which is hardly something I can get behind. AssaultCube Reloaded, MegaGlest, and Xonotic all happened because forks were allowed. If this so called "Free Game Alliance" really supports "open source", it should be promoting Ryzom, not PlaneShift.

I voiced my concerns about this supposed "Free Game Alliance" containing PlaneShift instead of the much more free/libre/open-source game, Ryzom. This is the response I got:

Hi Julian,
thanks for your feedback. Let's me answer you first with my hat of FGA founder.

The primary objective of the Free Game Alliance is to sustain volunteer projects, which have been build from scratch by a volunteer team. It started from the realization people these days do not understand anymore the difference between "free" and "made by volunteers", as most commercial products are advertized as free. FGA is made to raise the awareness of those volunteer projects and show some of their amazing results. Our primary objective is not to promote "Open Source" in all his forms or "Freedom" and we are not affiliated to any similar political movements. There are no politics in FGA.

About the licensing, FGA requires projects to have an Open Source license for their code, but apart from that project can have any license their want for other assets. There are many open source projects which use this concept, and we don't want to restrict the freedom of the projects, by imposing a specific license on other assets.

Speficially on Ryzom, it was a commercial product, and so is in no way elegible to be part of FGA, as it's not been made by a volunteer organization, but a commercial one. Ryzom is not a project built with the spirit FGA promotes. The fact it went opensource at a certain point is not making it a volunteer project.

Let me know answer you with my hat of PlaneShift founder.

The PlaneShift license has been debated many times, but in short we think it's the best (and only) way to sustain Open Source, as it ensures the uniqueness of the project style, design and setting. Open art is something I feel is a non-working concept for a game. In terms of ability to do modifications, it's expressed very well in our license page. We are actually encouranging people to do modifications to our code and improve it, and to use their modified clients on our servers. The only requirement is to use the package art with our servers, and not with other shard servers.

Forking is allowed by GPL, and so there is no debate on it. You can fork the code of PlaneShifr. We are just not promoting forking as we prefer people to contribute to our codebase instead.

I hope this clarifies your doubts,
let me know if you have other questions,
Luca.

A couple things I noticed from this:

First, the founder of PlaneShift is also the founder of this so-called "Free Game Alliance". That makes this sound really suspicious.

Second, despite all the talk about "open-source" and being called the "Free Game Alliance", neither freedom nor open-source are a primary concern. Open-source is a secondary concern to them, and it's more important to them for the effort to be done by volunteers, despite the fact that this requirement is buried in a single bullet point on the About page while "open-source" is talked about all over the place at length.

I am strongly convinced by this that the intentions of the "Free Game Alliance" are not as they appear. The purpose is obscured; the website talks about open-source so much that you'd think they support open-source (durrr), yet they say in E-mail that volunteer work, which they barely mention on the website, is most important. It's hard to say where they're being dishonest, but they're being dishonest somewhere so that they can include PlaneShift in their list.

Either way, Xonotic is not being honored at all by being a part of this.

onpon4, I see you haven't got much of a response here, so I'll say it: thank you for this. I don't know what to think of all of this, but I appreciate your investigation.

Well, after reading this page http://www.planeshift.it/license.html I realize what you meant with "Free Game Alliance" containing PlaneShift instead of the much more free/libre/open-source game". It still doesn't seem that "scammy", it seems they just want to keep the game as their property(or rather preventing forking, forking is proven to be something good though what would happen if nexuiz couldn't be forked?) which isn't wrong, they still allowing people to redistribute ad study the codebase. I think it's a good way to promote Xonotic, at least if FGA has lots of visitors.

A few more E-mails happened, but nothing worth reading. Their second E-mail to me was a series of quotes and an expression of amusement that "people... distort and misinterpret what's written". I responded by saying that the problem is the confusing, vague, and misused terminology. I then claimed that the use of "free" is simply a buzzword and insinuated that the purpose of the website is self-promotion, to which their response was, "Funny point of view. Goodbye."

I don't expect them to change, and I don't think further E-mail correspondence will yield any results. However, if you wish to dig, go ahead. Their E-mail address displayed on the website is info@freegamealliance.org.

It still doesn't seem that "scammy", it seems they just want to keep the game as their property(or rather preventing forking, forking is proven to be something good though what would happen if nexuiz couldn't be forked?) which isn't wrong, they still allowing people to redistribute ad study the codebase.

In effect, PlaneShift is not much worse than, say, Doom: the engine is free, but the game data isn't. The problem I have with it is I think it goes too far, but more than that, it's much too deliberate. This was a calculated move by them specifically to prevent forks.

Still, it is a bit worse than Doom: if the developers of PlaneShift decide to give up and take down their servers, you now can no longer legally use the data for anything. You can put up a new server, but you'll have to re-do all that effort that goes into creating the game data, which seems ironic; not wanting to duplicate effort is one justification they use for trying to prevent forks (of course, it isn't ironic; the justification is just absurd).

PlaneShift isn't so bad that I particularly feel it's necessary to discourage playing it or avoid playing it. However, it is bad enough that I would never want to promote it, and I would rather play (and encourage playing) Ryzom.

Well thanks for sharing you point-of-view. It surely sound bizzare(and probebly is) but I don't think planeshift devs have some evil purpose of their game.