The Oolite Extended Project - Fork, no oxp

[LittleBear]

Lestrade. The Thread for Random Hits states (post 1):-

Although a Beta, this version should be fully playable. It’s a Beta because I haven’t finished adding all the features I’d like to.

Its says it on the tin.

Yet you have PMed me again and again claiming that you didn't understand that Random Hits was WIP and unfinished.

Why? BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!

So why do you assume that any users of OSE will?

You have a history with OSE of introducing bugs to the game and then going though four basic phases:-

1) You deny the bug is there.
2) Anybody who claims the bug is there is bullying you.
3) Other Forum Members post the fix.
4) Several weeks later you release a new version of OSE fixing the bug you've created and unbreaking someone elses work.

Remember the Contrictor hunt bug? Caused by you C&Ping mission code into OSE /RS which broke the native mission?

Please would you either read the code I have written rather than just C&Ping it OR just take it from me as the author that C&Ping Random Hits code into another OXP creates another Constrictor Bug.

You may not understand why because you a) didn't write the code and b) haven't read it. But this does not alter the fact that your C&P and releasing of some eles mission code in OSE does cause a major problem.

This is the basic problem with OSE. OSE will always be several steps behind the 'real oxp'. Random Hits is a complicated OXP and thus easily broken.

As I've told you. By all means C&P my work into OSE. But you will have to maintain it, bug fix it and develop it.

The fact that you keep inisting that C&Ping Random Hits into OSE does not cause a problem, when I keep telling you as the author that actually IT DOES cause a problem, is precisiey why I would not wish to work with you on a joint OSE/Random Hits venture, whereby I have to rely on you to a) grasp there is a problem, b) update OSE, and c) have all OSE users update OSE in order that I can update my own OXP.

If you wish to take control of my work, I really I am OK with that. But then you'll have to do the work of bug fixing and developing it.[/code]

[pagroove]

Hi LB,
I must say, although the discussion goes on, I'm happy to see you debating again. A very warm re-welcome from me

Maybe I didn't read well but didn't Lestradae wrote:

Before making a beta-test version of OE (and this was still a beta-test version) accessible again, I'll disable or take out the RH WiP. And it is only going back in if and when you declare it finished (that is, no longer in a WiP state).

So if you first finish it as you like it. In your own time frame then there shouldn't be a problem. Or am I a bit naive?

Anyway. Happy to see you here again.

[Lestradae]

Erm ... LittleBear.

I am very happy that I have managed to reengage you in debate. But your tone clearly is not the way to go. Yes?

... you have PMed me ... that you didn't understand that Random Hits was WIP and unfinished. Why? BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!

As also said again and again: Guilty as charged. What shall I do now? Shoot myself? I can only avoid repeating mistakes in the future, can't change the past yet, sorry.

You have a history with OSE of introducing bugs to the game and then going though four basic phases:-

1) You deny the bug is there.
2) Anybody who claims the bug is there is bullying you.
3) Other Forum Members post the fix.
4) Several weeks later you release a new version of OSE fixing the bug you've created and unbreaking someone elses work.

Throwing things like that at each other is only going to get us into a new spiral of accusation, justification and counter-accusation. I could do a nice 1) to 4) answer to that one but what would that be for? Yeah, I am pleading "not guilty" on this one (four?). Let's better start to get level-headed and solve the problem at hand.

The fact that you keep inisting that C&Ping Random Hits into OSE does not cause a problem, when I keep telling you as the author that actually IT DOES cause a problem, is precisiey why I would not wish to work with you on a joint OSE/Random Hits venture, whereby I have to rely on you to a) grasp there is a problem, b) update OSE, and c) have all OSE users update OSE in order that I can update my own OXP.

Before making a beta-test version of OE (and this was still a beta-test version) accessible again, I'll disable or take out the RH WiP. And it is only going back in if and when you declare it finished (that is, no longer in a WiP state).

If you wish to take control of my work, I really I am OK with that.

Oh, come on

If you don't want to continue RH, it would be sad but it's your and your decision alone. But it should have become obvious in the meantime that if you tell me of a problem which I am causing for you I will do my best to remove that problem. I would love to see you continue, as would others. Jump over your shadow (can one actually say this in english?), breathe deeply and lie your cards on the table.

Greetings

L

[Chaky]

I'm opening a poll. Bookie-style.


You find this poll meaningless and discouraging? So do I with this flame-war. Take it as my opinion expression.

Edit: LOOL, AC, what took you so long?

Edit2: You got to give me credit for the formula, though.

[goran]

To bad that You guys didn't make any progress in this debate. Lestradae still don't respect wishes of the OXP authors and LB still don't want his work to be included in OSE. Finished or not.

[Lestradae]

Lestradae still don't respect wishes of the OXP authors and LB still don't want his work to be included in OSE.

goran, sorry to say that, but could I respectfully urge you to read what LB and myself both wrote above before posting stuff like this?

Seems a lot of problems ensue from people not reading the stuff of other people (including myself).

LB and myself are talking to each other again, and are both here again. That's a success. Don't damage that inadvertently because it is more exciting to see flames engulf everything?



L

@Chaky: Really, don't. I do understand well where you are coming from but this is not going to help!

[LittleBear]

Lestrade,

I really am Ok with you using the Random Hits Code and finishing it if you want to. I'm really busy with Real Life stuff and if I did try to finish it, it would probabley be another year before the next version comes out.

OSE has modified virtually every ship you included in it, whether by price, role, name or otherwise. In many cases I would be the first to agree you've improved the orginal.

But the point still remains that you are with OSE bascaly gathering up everyone elses stuff and changing it. That's OK, but I think you have to respect the fact that myself and many other writers just are not going to want to write stuff for the project on that basis. I'm not the first person to stop writing stuff because you've taken their work, changed it and included it in OSE without asking.

I really do lack the time to finish Random Hits properly at any speed that it likley to be acceptable to your release timescale for OSE, so I really am fine with you finishing it. But that does mean you'll have to do the hard work of fixing and deveoping the code. You can't really ask others to write code just so that you can include it in OSE.

You made very clear to me by PM that you did not ask my permission because you could not be expected to contact 200 authors before rolling up their work in OSE. That really is the problem I have with the OSE project. You wish to control all the OXPs by OSE. I don't want to write for a fun project under those conditions. And I'd simply ask that you respect my wishes on that point.

If you have the time to finish Random Hits, please feel free to include it and finish it. I'd like to see a finished version too! But please don't ask me to write for it, when you have made it very clear that you won't respect the wishes of other writers and will use anything anybody writes in OSE. You didn't ask me the first time you copied everything I had written into OSE and released it, so why do you think I would be interested in continuing to write when you don't respect the orginal author's wishes?

You have changed the roles, stats, names and AIs of other people's ships and when authors (eg Selzeen) have specificaly asked to you remove an old version of a ship from OSE because he's updated it, you have refused to do so.

You have repeadedly said on the boards that you won't be bullied and you will decide what goes in OSE. Fair enough. But don't expect me to write code when you have made very clear to other writers that you will not be told what to do with the code others have written and you C&P into OSE. If you want to me Lord of the OXPS, thats fine by me. But you will have to write for your own OXP rather than expecting me to do it.

[goran]

goran, sorry to say that, but could I respectfully urge you to read what LB and myself both wrote above before posting stuff like this?

Seems a lot of problems ensue from people not reading the stuff of other people (including myself).

LB and myself are talking to each other again, and are both here again. That's a success.

Oh, i read everything. Talking to each other again is maybe a success, but the dispute remains. As I see it it was never a license problem, but respect. And coming back to the board with "I checked with Creative Commons board" and digging up old posts that strengthen Your position is not promising.

All that aside, I would really like this thing settled once and for all and maybe stricter licensing is the way to go.

[DaddyHoggy]

goran, sorry to say that, but could I respectfully urge you to read what LB and myself both wrote above before posting stuff like this?

Seems a lot of problems ensue from people not reading the stuff of other people (including myself).

LB and myself are talking to each other again, and are both here again. That's a success.

Oh, i read everything. Talking to each other again is maybe a success, but the dispute remains. As I see it it was never a license problem, but respect. And coming back to the board with "I checked with Creative Commons board" and digging up old posts that strengthen Your position is not promising.

All that aside, I would really like this thing settled once and for all and maybe stricter licensing is the way to go.

It was I who accidentally dug up the old thread - in an effort to refute something Vajo said about Sung's texture's - there's a lot of stuff from the Sung incident left unresolved (it turns out) and a lot of the old arguments are being used again. It's a shame, me I'm just an old hippy, who thinks it can all be made better with a hug and several large and liberating glasses of good scotch.

I've had a few ideas of how we might go some way to sort this mess out (for the good of all) but I'm not quite ready to share them - as I need to think about the counter-claims that are bound to arise when I say what I have to say...

[Lestradae]

... maybe stricter licensing is the way to go.

Or maybe a more open source, copyleft approach to modding this game would?

I find it sad that much bigger, commercial games like the X series or Morrowind, Oblivion etc. have lively modders scenes which seem to have no big problems with mod bundles, sharing and four different versions of everything. As Ahruman said: It's a shame, that the open license doesn't invite to be more open. (With that I'm not implying that he endorses my position in any way. I'm just saying that I agree.)

It's a shame, me I'm just an old hippy, who thinks it can all be made better with a hug and several large and liberating glasses of good scotch.

I've had a few ideas of how we might go some way to sort this mess out (for the good of all) but I'm not quite ready to share them - as I need to think about the counter-claims that are bound to arise when I say what I have to say...

Whatever it is, by all means, let's hear it, as I for one am out of good ideas to resolve this conflict once and for all.

Put without bias, I think the problem is this:

* I and some other people would like to unite all oxps into a big bundle and modify/add a few things to give the whole OE oxp-batch a feeling of coherence. We think to ask to take oxps out from such a bundle would be like aegidian asking Drew to take the q-bomb out of his books, and we tend to an essentially open source, copyleft point of view.

* LittleBear and some other people basically want their oxps to stay separate, due to being personally proud of them, not wanting two or more different versions "out there" to be bugfixed and updated, and fears about a big bundle's difficulties when debugged and updated. They tend to an essentially "oxp copyright works similar to commercial software" point of view, and consider not asking authors to use/alter/recycle their stuff as bad faith.

Asking the Creative Commons board about their opinion is not an evil act, it's common sense. Oolite is not a living room project of a few people, it's a public open source project. The issue at hand is such that both positions summed up above seem to have some merit.

I have no idea how to find a common denominator for this. Someone suggested branching/forking Oolite itself with "forking off" an Oolite Extended branch - essentially making a new game out of OE. Not sure if that would solve the issue, but perhaps it would make Oolite plus oxps and Oolite Extended non-interchangeable and any user would know what he/she gets and who is responsible for what.



L

[Cmd. Cheyd]

I've had an idea brewing in the back of my brain for a while... Take it with a cinderblock-sized grain of salt.

OSE/OE (OSE from here out for me) has been dubbed a "Meta-OXP". To be honest, I hate that term to describe OSE in it's current form. But, it sparked the seed for this idea. Maybe the way forward, and yes Les - it means massive recoding, would be to break OSE into it's component parts, each usable independently, but all together form the OSE universe.

It would work like this - You release OSE - Combat Computers.oxp, OSE - Player Stations.oxp, OSE - New Worlds.oxp, Realistic Shipyards 4.oxp (using exclusively Shipdata-overrides.oxp)... This way, the OSE "Meta-Oxp" is created by including all the different components of OSE, but if a player wants just one part, they can get that ONE part. It also means all the RH, Ionics, etc OXP's would NOT be included. That way, as their original authors update them, their would be no need to do the "Upgrade Shuffle" with OSE. If there are conflicts or issues encountered between OSE and a mission or other OXP, it could be handled with API type approaches. This is what I did when issues were raised with the way I was doing things with SR2. I created an API to allow other OXP authors to pass information to SR2 so my creation and theirs could coexist better. It also means that as more components of OSE are present, additional functions / routines become usable in each of the component OSE OXP's as they can leverage their bretheren OSE OXP's. So if you have OSE- Part 1, you get Feature 1. If you have OSE - Part 2, you get Feature 2. But, if you have OSE - Part 1 and OSE - Part 2, you would get Feature 1, Feature 2, and Feature 3 because Part 1 leverages some of the stuff Part 2 has, or vice versa, to make Feature 3.

I think this would solve much of the issues here, it would allow you to recycle massive amounts of your existing work without completely trashing it L, and it would allow LB and other authors to continue to develop their own material in the manner they wish. It also makes OSE a unique entity by truely being a "META-OXP" - One where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts because additional features, places, ships, etc become available when all the OSE parts are present and can leverage each other.

I hope I explained this well enough you get the idea... Or at least well enough someone else gets the idea and can better put it into words.

[Cmdr James]

Sorry but this is just not fair. Copyleft does not involve theft of other peoples work.

Most distros of Linux are predominantly open source or "copyleft". They do not contain bits of Windows and OSX and claim thats somehow ok. If an element isnt licensed for your use, and they ask you to remove it, then you should. Im sure Red Hat would be happy to remove something that they bundled with an incorrect license.

Open source relies on strong clear license conditions, so that everyone knows where they stand.

You dont know the reasons people want their stuff left out of your bundle, it may be from pride, but it could be for other reasons, such as those given.

How to solve this? Its simple, you bundle what people are happy to let you bundle, no more. And I thought you already agreed to this, so where is the problem. L leave LB alone, and follow through with your commitment to remove all the contentious bits, and LB, you stop complaining as long as L is good to his word.

[ClymAngus]

Ok we need some ground work here. A constitution if you will.

1) One of the intrinsic rights of any player is to make oxp's
2) This right extends to maintaining OXP's that said player has written.
3) The free nature of oolite on which these embellishing and alteration programs run make ownership and reverse-reengineering a matter of open and vibrant debate.
4) Any one player, or group of collaborative players do not have the right to order the removal of another players oxp even if they have altered it significantly for the better.
5) The only way to assure choice, maintaining (and expanding) the diverse way of experiencing this game whilst extending the ease of use; is to maintain an atmosphere where by oxps can exist in several forms.

6) IT IS THE DUTY of any oxper to provide well structured documentation with their oxp and the duty of ANY reverse-reengineerer to document their alterations to the variations they create.

Does this sound reasonable for openers?

[Cmdr James]

Who is going to enforce this. And what happens if I dont provide documentation for my OXP?

Its a nice idea, I just dont see that it will work.

[Lestradae]

@LittleBear:

You made very clear to me by PM that you did not ask my permission because you could not be expected to contact 200 authors before rolling up their work in OSE. That really is the problem I have with the OSE project. You wish to control all the OXPs by OSE. I don't want to write for a fun project under those conditions. And I'd simply ask that you respect my wishes on that point.

If you have the time to finish Random Hits, please feel free to include it and finish it. I'd like to see a finished version too! But please don't ask me to write for it, when you have made it very clear that you won't respect the wishes of other writers and will use anything anybody writes in OSE. You didn't ask me the first time you copied everything I had written into OSE and released it, so why do you think I would be interested in continuing to write when you don't respect the orginal author's wishes?

You really can be hard work, man. Do you actually wish to find a win-win solution of this debate? Just, as our talks progress, I seem to get this "I or you" vibe and it doesn't go away or peter out.

I also want to remind you of the fact that when you last were close to quit Oolite, it was in the debate with Sung, and back then - to 100% - you backed my side of this discussion. Think about it. What changed?

If you do not want to find a solution that can make both of us happy, please say so and spare both of us the energy to continue this debate.

@Cmd. Cheyd:

Maybe the way forward, and yes Les - it means massive recoding, would be to break OSE into it's component parts, each usable independently, but all together form the OSE universe.

It would work like this - You release OSE - Combat Computers.oxp, OSE - Player Stations.oxp, OSE - New Worlds.oxp, Realistic Shipyards 4.oxp (using exclusively Shipdata-overrides.oxp)... This way, the OSE "Meta-Oxp" is created by including all the different components of OSE, but if a player wants just one part, they can get that ONE part. It also means all the RH, Ionics, etc OXP's would NOT be included.

The problem with this is - I've already thought about it before, more than once, btw - that this would defeat the whole purpose of an "extended" Oolite. Some oxps need to be tweaked to work together like this at all (they don't do that well if 200+ of the originals are singularly used in the AddOns folder btw), and some things in the OSE/OE Ooniverse only make sense (are not too uber) with those tweaks in place. So, I am afraid, for me, this would not be a solution to realise what I would like to realise.

@ClymAngus:

Ok we need some ground work here. A constitution if you will.

1) One of the intrinsic rights of any player is to make oxp's
2) This right extends to maintaining OXP's that said player has written.
3) The free nature of oolite on which these embellishing and alteration programs run make ownership and reverse-reengineering a matter of open and vibrant debate.
4) Any one player, or group of collaborative players do not have the right to order the removal of another players oxp even if they have altered it significantly for the better.
5) The only way to assure choice, maintaining (and expanding) the diverse way of experiencing this game whilst extending the ease of use; is to maintain an atmosphere where by oxps can exist in several forms.

6) IT IS THE DUTY of any oxper to provide well structured documentation with their oxp and the duty of ANY reverse-reengineerer to document their alterations to the variations they create.

Does this sound reasonable for openers?

For me, this does sound very reasonable. I would agree to this any time! Let's see what others have to say.

@Cmdr James:

Who is going to enforce this. And what happens if I dont provide documentation for my OXP?

Its a nice idea, I just dont see that it will work.

No one would have to or even be able to enforce this. It could simply be a community agreement about how to handle situations like this that could/should be made very visible to anyone who starts doing oxps (announcement/sticky?). Perhaps an "How-To do oxps" guide could be made and have ClymAngus' "constitution" on the tin?

What happens if someone doesn't provide documentation? Well, what happens now, that's what happens.

Oh, and:

Copyleft does not involve theft of other peoples work.

Snide remarks like that don't help, do they? Comparing linux (essence of copyleft) with M$ (essence of copyright) is not very convincing, either.