At 27.03.2011, Igor.Zobin[@nospam] wrote: > As far games go, I don't believe they ought to be free software. Stallman > himself stated somewhere that works of general use should be free and so > software should be free.
On many occasions Stallman have said that games are software, and as such they should be free software. An example is given how: developers could and should release the code (as free software) and the data as separate packages. If I remember correctly, he claims the data (images, video, sound) are the art not the whole game. I'm sorry could not provide a link to back up this. > > Games are not works of general use (even though they are software). They are > pure entertainment and one can work without them just fine. I see no issue at > > all in using Wine to play commercial games. Buying commercial games doesn't > harm the cause of free software either. How should it? There is no monopoly > on the gaming market, we have a healthy free market competition there. Hell, > some games even ship with special editors that enable users to create > modifications! > I'd even go so far, as to tell that consoles are allowed to have proprietary > operating systems as long as the console isn't meant to deal with everyday > computing like browsing the net and whatnot. The entertainment part comes mostly from the visual and audio effects. But to achieve this, the software must do its job, to combine them and run them at the appropriate moment. Suppose that a group of game developers programmed good artificial intelligence algorithm, that allows computer players to collectively solve a task, walk trough a maze, locate a moving target, use web cameras to recognize movement behaviour etc. etc. The problem does not matter. Now imagine that this algorithm is ported or could be directly used with embedded system or miniature robots or whatever mobile hardware. It could be used to solve real practical tasks. For example in agriculture, medicine, automatic cleaning vehicles and so on. Lets take for example, the situation I described above on a console. If one has access to the software and could connect custom or general purpose hardware to some port (RJ45/Ethernet, USB), this could be used to solve variety of problems. For example while you are playing the game the external hardware doing some work. Consoles are just locked by software computers. If you have free software on them you could use them as general purpose computers. Well maybe not righ out of the box. Yes, this is all hypothetical, but is still possible. Things not obvious for you and me, might be an idea for someone else.
