On Friday, 9 August 2019 at 02:22:11 UTC, DanielG wrote:
Software is a funny thing. I'm old enough to remember when
everything was locked down and proprietary, of economic
necessity. Nowadays it's almost entirely the opposite, for the
same reason.
We're definitely well into the Singularity, but because our
time perception is keeping up with it, it doesn't *seem* like
things are moving as fast as they really are. But whenever I
stop to really appreciate what's possible with software now,
most of it was nearly or totally inconceivable back in the 90s.
Fully expecting to be gunned down by a Boston Dynamics T-800
any day now.
Sometimes even middleware was so proprietary that it took the
community to reverse engineer how to interface with various
hardware, some pieces of hardware were partly a failure thanks to
that. An example is Creative's ASP chip for the SB16 and 32, and
they learned so well from the events that they bought up OpenAL
to make it proprietary.
Nowadays I'm thinking on what kind of license should I use on my
"open source media franchise" (or whatever I should call it),
since I don't want to keep it all for myself, and I would like to
encourage other authors to not only write what is essentially
glorified fanfiction, but to contribute back so other creators
and even I can build upon that. My current candidate is LGPL on
the lore, character design, etc, while end products using them
can be proprietary.
