| Author | Comment |
Jayhawk
Dragoon
Posted: 18 Jan 2005
07:48 GMT
Total Posts: 80 | Many programmers release source code to their games under free (as in speech) licenses. One advantage of this is giving new programmers a chance to study existing code and learn from it. Unfortunately, there's also the risk of code theft -- modifying the credits in the program and re-releasing it without crediting the original author.
And so I have three questions to answer:
Are you concerned about code theft in free software?
Yes
No
Which is a bigger problem to the TI community?
Code theft
Lack of source code examples for beginning programmers
Would you release the source code to your programs under a free license?
Yes
No
Thank you for participating in this survey. If you have further comments, please leave them as replies to this message. |
Morgan
Ultralisk
Posted: 18 Jan 2005
10:45 GMT
Total Posts: 321 | For the second I seriously didn't think either was a problem. I got minimal inquiries about the stealing of code when I worked at ticalc. I couldn;t vote on that one because there is no lack of source code for beginning programmers to learn from.
I personally could not make sence out of any tutorials for z80 ASM and so I just downloaded masses of source files looking for the bits and pieces of code I was looking for. Heck I still do that. There have been a few things I haven't found yet, and a few things I was shown how to do by very generous programmers, but for the most part if you really wantto learn ASM there is enough material for you to start and do so if you really want to.
I wish everyone would release their source...that way we could all learn from each other. |
JcCorp
Probe
Posted: 18 Jan 2005
16:02 GMT
Total Posts:
Edit | Obviously, this doesn't refer to BASIC as much as ASM/z80/C, as you can easy view the source to any of those. When I was briefly interested in ASM (and then got bored), I would look for sources like in Avalanch and other simple programs, sometimes play with them, and then attempt for 30 minutes to compile it right. So the lesson here is, yes, there definitely should be more code protection.
Unfortunately, BASIC is very hard to protect. It is extremely simple to unlock a program and steal huge amounts. When I looked at other programs to learn the language, I would build an entirely new program from scratch and put my own optimizations in it. I wouldn't copy games, I would learn from them. There should be some sort of licence for BASIC, definitely, so people could learn, but not steal. |
Jayhawk
Dragoon
Posted: 19 Jan 2005
13:55 GMT
Total Posts: 80 | I won't go into it here, but there's been some pretty egregious examples of code theft in the past. Anyone who's been in the community very long probably knows exactly what I'm referring to. But while they've been very egregious (stealing entire programs), they've also been rather rare; you don't see lots of programs illegally modified and released.
As far as BASIC programs, it's very difficult to protect them. While some of the complex and high quality BASIC games might be worthy of protection, why would you want to protect a program to solve a quadratic equation?
The question is, though, does the benefits of protecting code outweigh the potential benefits from releasing more source code? Is it more beneficial to the community to curb isolated (though egregious) examples of code theft or to release more source in hopes that beginners will learn from it and release more software? |
