Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit. I asked him [0]:
Have you considered open sourcing more pieces of Dwarf Fortress so that the
community can try to help with the nitty gritty engine bits while you can
continue having sole ownership of the underlying direction?
The pathfinding and multithreading optimization is a good example of
something I'd love to help with given the opportunity. (Related to this
question.)
Is there any other way that the more technically-inclined can help?
Tarn's response:
I'm just not a project manager. I tried sharing the pathfinding code with
some people, and some progress was made, but unless my involvement is more
hands-on, I don't think it'll work, and I didn't want to be involved in that
kind of arrangement. On the other hand, the porting and graphics work with
Baughn went pretty well, although now I can't work with the graphics code
myself because I don't understand it. I'd hate to have that happen to more core
pieces of the game. Baughn also had to suffer a lot of annoyances because I
have no inclination toward things like version control.
"I'm just not a project manager." As someone who has several active open source projects, I can very much relate. I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it. Also, not everyone is good at maintaining this kind of thing, so it could cause more harm than benefit to the project.
I too wish the code was open source, but I can understand the reluctance and speculate that it may even be the correct decision until the project is completed or abandoned.
The thing is, they literally would not have to change a single thing after releasing the source code. They could refrain from looking at a single pull request. But perhaps their fear is that community additions may lead to a variously forked ecosystem which could dilute the "Dwarf Fortress" name thus dilute their grand vision.
Indeed. They have a captive audience right now which donates on average more than $4,000/mo for the work of Tarn and Zach.
Take the +12 month release cycles, there will surely be more active open source forks than what the Adams' can compete with, resulting not only in loss of their revenue stream but also loss of control of their vision. Perhaps this would be an altruistic benefit to the community, but probably a solid loss for the creators unless they're willing and succeed in diving in and leading the community of contributors as a whole.
Very risky.
Also from another interview, Tarn spoke about how he sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work. This is the masterpiece that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting. Imagine a master painter like Picasso working on a piece for nearly a decade, being asked to let the community contribute to it so that it will be completed sooner.
Sure, but look at what happened to Arc. There was excitement in the beginning, but since pg wasn't really taking patches (except bug fixes), the community forked the project and started working cool stuff on their own. Eventually, pg released new versions, which never incorporated the community fork's changes, so bit rot crept in, and people gradually lost interest and drifted away from the project. The project isn't dead exactly (is Lisp ever really dead?), but it isn't the hub of activity it was at the beginning.
I don't think dilution is main threat here. I think turning Dwarf Fortress into a viable open source community takes effort, and just letting the code into the wild won't necessarily accomplish much.
If someone forked Dwarf Fortress and changed the key bindings to a sane default, I would switch to Midget Mountain or Little People Palace or whatever in a heart beat.
Someone tried making their own clone, with a better interface and gameplay in the direction they wanted it to go. It's hard to replicate the amount of effort that has gone into DF.
There are a lot of "clones", but these are essentially DF lite. They mimic the basic gameplay of digging under ground and building some sort of fort. Read through the past 3 months of updates ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ ) and you will see how ludicrously complex & detailed the game has become. You can't explain some of these things in a feature checklist, but rather with paragraphs.
I have no inclination toward things like version control
This is the key right here! Without version control, there's absolutely no way he's going to be able to collaborate with a whole bunch of people on this thing. If he decides to dump the source code up on his site, it's basically read-only at that point.
Besides that, he derives his income from donations. He does not want his project getting forked and his community leaving him behind in the dust.
Comments
Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit. I asked him [0]:
Tarn's response: "I'm just not a project manager." As someone who has several active open source projects, I can very much relate. I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it. Also, not everyone is good at maintaining this kind of thing, so it could cause more harm than benefit to the project.I too wish the code was open source, but I can understand the reluctance and speculate that it may even be the correct decision until the project is completed or abandoned.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...
The thing is, they literally would not have to change a single thing after releasing the source code. They could refrain from looking at a single pull request. But perhaps their fear is that community additions may lead to a variously forked ecosystem which could dilute the "Dwarf Fortress" name thus dilute their grand vision.
Indeed. They have a captive audience right now which donates on average more than $4,000/mo for the work of Tarn and Zach.
Take the +12 month release cycles, there will surely be more active open source forks than what the Adams' can compete with, resulting not only in loss of their revenue stream but also loss of control of their vision. Perhaps this would be an altruistic benefit to the community, but probably a solid loss for the creators unless they're willing and succeed in diving in and leading the community of contributors as a whole.
Very risky.
Also from another interview, Tarn spoke about how he sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work. This is the masterpiece that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting. Imagine a master painter like Picasso working on a piece for nearly a decade, being asked to let the community contribute to it so that it will be completed sooner.
Exactly, we should understand the fact that open sourcing is not always compatiable with a work of art. (Games are art now, right?)
Sure, but look at what happened to Arc. There was excitement in the beginning, but since pg wasn't really taking patches (except bug fixes), the community forked the project and started working cool stuff on their own. Eventually, pg released new versions, which never incorporated the community fork's changes, so bit rot crept in, and people gradually lost interest and drifted away from the project. The project isn't dead exactly (is Lisp ever really dead?), but it isn't the hub of activity it was at the beginning.
I don't think dilution is main threat here. I think turning Dwarf Fortress into a viable open source community takes effort, and just letting the code into the wild won't necessarily accomplish much.
If someone forked Dwarf Fortress and changed the key bindings to a sane default, I would switch to Midget Mountain or Little People Palace or whatever in a heart beat.
Someone tried making their own clone, with a better interface and gameplay in the direction they wanted it to go. It's hard to replicate the amount of effort that has gone into DF.
http://www.goblincamp.com/
There are a lot of "clones", but these are essentially DF lite. They mimic the basic gameplay of digging under ground and building some sort of fort. Read through the past 3 months of updates ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ ) and you will see how ludicrously complex & detailed the game has become. You can't explain some of these things in a feature checklist, but rather with paragraphs.
Gnomoria seems to be coming along:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E75mL6R42i0
Lots of updates, but it's not open source as far as I can tell.
I have no inclination toward things like version control
This is the key right here! Without version control, there's absolutely no way he's going to be able to collaborate with a whole bunch of people on this thing. If he decides to dump the source code up on his site, it's basically read-only at that point.
Besides that, he derives his income from donations. He does not want his project getting forked and his community leaving him behind in the dust.