Level Based For Profit Open Source

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Jameson Bennett   (Jan 10, 2006 at 17:14 GMT)

Interesting.

For a good economic model, check out MySQL. They profit in providing support, not with the actual codebase and engine.

Many other OS projects expand on the feature set and sell a higher level software than the OS counterpart. A good example: Poseidon is based on the OS argoUML project.

Also, keep in mind there are about a million different types of OS licenses available, depending on the developer(s) and what they want to make available to who. BSD style licenses allow devs to use code with no credit or code release and GPL and LGPL require some form of source release to the public. Many other licenses have other requirements. Your personal definition of OS may differ from these definitions and licenses, reading your blogs it isnt too clear on what you consider open source.

Trying to set a model based on contribution would be difficult, as creating a metric for measuring contribution can be extremely problematic. Do you count lines of code (w or w/o comments)? Artistic contribution? Meaningful features coded? It goes on and on.

Although not open source, TGE has a good model and several artists and coders have profited from it creating code and content packs as add ons to the engine, script and art side. If the codebase is open source I can't see any other approach to the problem that is not inherently problematic and doomed to infighting between developers who all may consider thier contribution of equal or more value.

I also recommend checking out Blender.org, the history and developers that run and maintain that project. It has a great history of raising money when needed and all developers are well known and credited within the circles that care.
Edited on Jan 10, 2006 17:15 GMT

Jameson Bennett   (Jan 10, 2006 at 17:17 GMT)

BTW, check your blog links, they are broken! :)

Brian Jones   (Jan 11, 2006 at 07:33 GMT)   Resource Rating: 4

Jameson, I appreciate your comments, although a little off track (which makes sense if the links aren't loading, however they seem to be just fine for me?).

My goal isn't focused on creating a for profit open source model in the general sense, but focused on game development. So while the MySQL project, and an even bigger example RedHat work well because they have a support model carrying them, support isn't exactly what makes game development move. Blender is a wonderful project, which I've had the chance to use since back when Ton was the sole developer and we could chat with him on IRC, and I think the software has been improved greatly since becoming open source, however in the end it's unfortunate that NaN couldn't get enough steam behind it to remain profitable with Blender alone.

What I am really aiming at is a community project that allows developers to network together. The premise, as summarized from my blog, is basically the idea that people can join a project, contribute to it, and if they reach some threshold and the project goes "live" earn a percentage of cash based on their contributions.

The idea follows that: project maintainers create tasks, and assign an "experience" value to each task. As members continue to contribute to a project, they gain "experience". For example, 5xp for a texture, 100xp for a complex model, 5,000xp for an engine component overhaul, and that experience gained towardsd their next upon successful inclusion into the core project. Upon reaching a certain level, they pass a "threshold" that vests them into the project, thus allowing them to earn money based on their level of contribution. The reasoning for this is to keep the serious developers in the monetary fold, and the casual contributers in the credits.

The main idea is to give people some level of incentive to contribute to a project. It would weed out those artists or programmers that aren't very serious, because a serious contributer will pass that threshold point to vest themself into the project (even if it never goes gold). And hey, leveling is kind of fun so why not integrate it into a work like environment?

Anyways, my followup from last night.

Brian Jones   (Jan 11, 2006 at 07:40 GMT)   Resource Rating: 4

Oh right, and as far as how to weigh how much the "experience" for a component is worth, it would have to be by some form of commitee. Naturally an arbitrary number can be assigned, but what if one guy vested 100 hours into the task 'Build Component X' and came up with only a 500 lines of brain shattering code (you know the kind, where you sit there for hours and end up only producing 10 lines of the best code you've ever made in your life). How do you rate that, especially if the task was supposed to be "Moderately Difficult" and turned out to be "Difficult at Epic Proportions"? Especially if while the code component is key to the project, you aren't sure how to weigh the persons effort?

This is another reason why I posted to the community. Is there a way to make a balanced contribution system? Contributing to a game project can be so subjective in this context, it makes me wonder if I am just on a useless tangent.

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