Saturday, June 28, 2008

FLOSS (The Open Source Kind) vs Video Games

I'm a hug fan of open sourced software.
I also hope to get a job, and later maybe even start a company, developing video games.

I don't really think these two thing conflict much.

I view video games less as software, which does better in an open and sharing environment, and more as art, which the creator of definitely has the moral right to sell, as it is his/hers/their creative work. I will grant that the same argument could be made for most software, but most software has some utilitarian purpose, which generally results in most software being essentially a tool. Now, one does expect to buy tools, but one also expects to be able to examine a tool to discover how it works at will. Very few people want to examine art in this way, which is my rationalization for closed source video games being acceptable.

Just image buying a hammer with the disclaimer that you can't try to figure out how it functions, by any means that you can come up with.
In contrast, would dissecting a painting really tell you why it is so evocative?

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