make the site code available/open

[nietzsche]

There's no need to fear people stealing the code and making their own site, there are different types of licenses.

This is absolutely correct. The MPAA posts a very stern copyright notice on Hollywood movies, reminding people they can be sued for lots of money if they steal movies, and this has been very effective in combating piracy.

Indeed. They even have public addresses for everyone to know. They even have a HDNS system (House-DNS) so that people don't forget where they live and advertise projections of such movies.

[Alexscelus]

The MPAA posts a very stern copyright notice on Hollywood movies

You realize that's a different industry, right? If you think it's relevant, I have some examples regarding copyright infringement and drug trafficking pirates stealing yachts in the Gulf of Mexico.

[Metsfanmax]

The MPAA posts a very stern copyright notice on Hollywood movies

You realize that's a different industry, right?

Ooh, good point. Thanks for the reminder. Originally I thought that internet gaming and movie-making were part of the same industry, but upon careful reflection I now realize there are some differences.

(Although if you spend enough time reading the clans section here it's easy to get confused)

If you think it's relevant, I have some examples regarding copyright infringement and drug trafficking pirates stealing yachts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course it is relevant. The only people who own yachts are rich people. The only people who produce Hollywood movies are rich people. This is Robin Hood shit going on here.

[Alexscelus]

Ooh, good point.

I agree it is a good point! Movie piracy and browser game piracy are completely different processes.

When you illegally host movies, you only need to be able to build and maintain your original site (or another pirate's), not produce Blockbuster knock-offs.

When you host a copy of someone's game, you need to be able to maintain the game -- the protected work itself, which means you need to understand the entire code and could have written it yourself. It's not that there aren't illegal knock-offs but the issue isn't whether or not someone can copy your work and get away with it; the issue is can they present it as well as or better than the original?

Rather than going off on a tangent about how opensource is hypothetically bad for cases similar (or dissimilar) to this one, please, would naysayers highlight specific instances of gaming companies which opened their code to the public and subsequently suffered from it? The more similar to Conquer Club the better, obviously (obviously).

And are you saying that if men in tights asked you to join Subjugation Society, you would leave CC? Why? Would it be because needs a more inspired GUI? a more modern color scheme? more customizing features? an even more active community deeply involved in the development and success of CC? If only something could be done!

[Metsfanmax]

When you host a copy of someone's game, you need to be able to maintain the game -- the protected work itself, which means you need to understand the entire code and could have written it yourself. It's not that there aren't illegal knock-offs but the issue isn't whether or not someone can copy your work and get away with it; the issue is can they present it as well as or better than the original?

Not at all true. It is often the case that people just need inspiration for certain algorithms or implementations so that they can implement a similar feature on their own site. The biggest concern here wouldn't be that someone would make a direct CC clone, it would be that CC's competitors would get free ideas for improvement on the features they have that aren't as good as ours.

At any rate I have no intention of having this debate; I was commenting on the fact that a license is not going to stop someone from stealing the code, at which point you responsed that there are also other considerations to stop someone from stealing the code. Which, even if true, was not really a response to my point.

If I am a naysayer, it's because there's very few people left who can use an open-sourced codebase to do anything useful, and because the current webmaster is unlikely to accept contributions from the people who would.

[GoranZ]

Open the code to everyone so that we can fix issues/ improve the site


Specifics/Details:
Make the code of the different parts of the system open so everyone can improve it.
Chose the license that fits best for the owner.
Create a process of testing and selecting the improvements


How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:
There are a bunch of programmers playing in this site. By making the code available to everyone, a lot of issues would be fixed quickly and a lot of improvements would be made.
There's no need to fear people stealing the code and making their own site, there are different types of licenses.

I guarantee that in no time, people will start improving the code. And a democratic process would naturally select what the best options are.

Making the code open source(now available as you say it) wont change anything to good, not a single thing. It might change things to bad tho.

Care to elaborate?

I'm little bit late on the reply...

-IDK how smart or proper is to give web sites code to the public. I dont think it can work properly.
-Making the source open will literally mean giving it to the public for maintenance/upgrade. That would reduce the quality even if all changes are approved by the current owner/team.
-Once open sourced, the public would push for more advanced features to be implemented, expectations would rise but IDK how good would those changes be implemented from open source team.
-In the end with open source developers I expect more advanced features but more bugs also... And those bugs in the end can take too much time for fixing.
-Even if the code is properly saved by licensing, the license for the code from open source developers would be problematic.
-In the end we might find our selves in a position for the competition to acquire some of our best developers since they would be known publicly... or even worse reuse portions of our code.

[Alexscelus]

My goodness, would someone who doesn't like the idea please reference specific instances of gaming companies that opened their code to the public and then suffered because of doing so?

There are only so many times a reiteration of the same unverifiable, evidence-less, proof-free opinion can contribute to the conversation.

[Metsfanmax]

My goodness, would someone who doesn't like the idea please reference specific instances of gaming companies that opened their code to the public and then suffered because of doing so?

There are only so many times a reiteration of the same unverifiable, evidence-less, proof-free opinion can contribute to the conversation.

...would someone who does like the idea please reference specific instances of gaming companies that opened their code to the public at all? If we have a sample size of zero similar sites then neither argument has any purchase.

[Shannon Apple]

LOL! This wouldn't be very smart of CC to open it's code to the public. It would be absolute madness.

People who work in any of the creative industries would know that it's incredibly easy to take someone elses work and improve on it, especially when most of the work is already done. They wouldn't help CC, they would create their own site for profit.


Look at what Evony did to Civilization, and got away with it. I don't think their code is open source, but they got away with it. It was so obvious. They were made change some things and their name from Civony, but at the end of the day, they made profit from someone else's code and the result was a really shitty game designed to squeeze money out of people non-stop.

[nietzsche]

feck off Shannon

[isaiah40]

Anyone can get hold of the game interface and game code amongst others all by themselves if they know where to look. I know but I am not telling!

[blakebowling]

Anyone can get hold of the game interface and game code amongst others all by themselves if they know where to look. I know but I am not telling!

Sure, you can get the javascript easily. It's the server-side code that's important.

[Metsfanmax]

Anyone can get hold of the game interface and game code amongst others all by themselves if they know where to look. I know but I am not telling!

Sure, you can get the javascript easily. It's the server-side code that's important.

Do you have personal thoughts on this? I take you as someone who might be friendly to the open source community. Or maybe I am just projecting.

[blakebowling]

Anyone can get hold of the game interface and game code amongst others all by themselves if they know where to look. I know but I am not telling!

Sure, you can get the javascript easily. It's the server-side code that's important.

Do you have personal thoughts on this? I take you as someone who might be friendly to the open source community. Or maybe I am just projecting.

I'm typically in favor of open source projects. Mediawiki / Wikipedia is a good example of how an open source project can lend itself towards a large website. As far as CC goes, I have some concerns about opening the code up simply because of competition. I previously had an idea to open source a portion of the code, basically allowing people to customize the UI without potentially compromising the bits of magic that make CC tick.

My main concern is how fragmented and complex the current code is. Basically, in order for an open source project to work in any scale, at least a large portion of the code would have to be re-written from scratch or largely re-worked. This is something that I would love to do, but simply don't have the time to undertake.

In theory, this is a good idea. In practice, I'm not sure it's something that could reasonably be done anytime soon.

[nietzsche]

Anyone can get hold of the game interface and game code amongst others all by themselves if they know where to look. I know but I am not telling!

Sure, you can get the javascript easily. It's the server-side code that's important.

Do you have personal thoughts on this? I take you as someone who might be friendly to the open source community. Or maybe I am just projecting.

I'm typically in favor of open source projects. Mediawiki / Wikipedia is a good example of how an open source project can lend itself towards a large website. As far as CC goes, I have some concerns about opening the code up simply because of competition. I previously had an idea to open source a portion of the code, basically allowing people to customize the UI without potentially compromising the bits of magic that make CC tick.

My main concern is how fragmented and complex the current code is. Basically, in order for an open source project to work in any scale, at least a large portion of the code would have to be re-written from scratch or largely re-worked. This is something that I would love to do, but simply don't have the time to undertake.

In theory, this is a good idea. In practice, I'm not sure it's something that could reasonably be done anytime soon.

i had a hunch this was the case with respect to the code. because of the time it takes to implement stuff, i think i had discussed the with mets the code was already a spagetti.

[iAmCaffeine]

Do you know how easy it is to get the code anyway? I could have it done overnight.

[waauw]

Do you know how easy it is to get the code anyway? I could have it done overnight.

Then why don't you?

[nietzsche]

I doubt it's possible.

CC it's located in a big hosting site, who should have all their devices with software/firmware promptly updated. There are a couple of mistakes when setting up apache that would allow someone with knowledge to get files, but I doubt it's the case with CC.

Of course anything is possible, specially if you're quicker than the server managers to work on the known vulnerabilities, and know how to exploit them. But my spidy sense tells me caff is just bluffing.

[iAmCaffeine]

I doubt it's possible.

CC it's located in a big hosting site, who should have all their devices with software/firmware promptly updated. There are a couple of mistakes when setting up apache that would allow someone with knowledge to get files, but I doubt it's the case with CC.

Of course anything is possible, specially if you're quicker than the server managers to work on the known vulnerabilities, and know how to exploit them. But my spidy sense tells me caff is just bluffing.

Not bluffing. I don't have the knowledge to do it myself but I know people that could do it easily. I'm not really for opening the code to anyone, just stating a fact.

[nietzsche]

I doubt it's possible.

CC it's located in a big hosting site, who should have all their devices with software/firmware promptly updated. There are a couple of mistakes when setting up apache that would allow someone with knowledge to get files, but I doubt it's the case with CC.

Of course anything is possible, specially if you're quicker than the server managers to work on the known vulnerabilities, and know how to exploit them. But my spidy sense tells me caff is just bluffing.

Not bluffing. I don't have the knowledge to do it myself but I know people that could do it easily. I'm not really for opening the code to anyone, just stating a fact.

The people you know could do it need something to be left open to get in. If the hosting site is correctly protected/updated they can't get in. Unless there's a bad configuration of the apache server or a vulnerability they can't.

[blakebowling]

I won't go into specifics, but there is a decent amount of security protecting CC and it's servers.

[iAmCaffeine]

I doubt it's possible.

CC it's located in a big hosting site, who should have all their devices with software/firmware promptly updated. There are a couple of mistakes when setting up apache that would allow someone with knowledge to get files, but I doubt it's the case with CC.

Of course anything is possible, specially if you're quicker than the server managers to work on the known vulnerabilities, and know how to exploit them. But my spidy sense tells me caff is just bluffing.

Not bluffing. I don't have the knowledge to do it myself but I know people that could do it easily. I'm not really for opening the code to anyone, just stating a fact.

The people you know could do it need something to be left open to get in. If the hosting site is correctly protected/updated they can't get in. Unless there's a bad configuration of the apache server or a vulnerability they can't.

Incorrect.

I won't go into specifics, but there is a decent amount of security protecting CC and it's servers.

That's somewhat reassuring.

[nietzsche]

lol ok.

there's a third and fourth options.

the third option would require you to hack either blake or bigwham. You would need to gather info in one of them, expect him to have vulnerabilities in their system, be able to exploit them, then wait for them to enter their password, run a ssh conection from their machine to the server, get the info you're looking for, etc. Then hack their Isp to delete all traces (again hoping there are vulnerabilities there). As you can imagine this is not done over night, it's not impossible, but unlikely.

the fourth option is to send a comando to kidnap blake or bigwham and torture them until they give you the info you need.

you seem so certain that i bet you're thinkjng of the fourth option.

i actually worked with a guy that did these kinds of things as a hobby, he taught me a trick or two, and i can tell you there's no magic way of hacking everything. hacking a system depends on exploiting a vulnerability in the system, and these vulnerabilities are being closed within a day of being found. all you have to do to close them is simply install the update, which these days is basically one click away.

the third option i mentioned, which is the most likely to succed, can't be done over night, you need to gather blake or bigwham's personal info first, to be able to track their ip, somehow. and then pray they're running and outdated windows without any kind of protection, or conecting to the hosting service using telnet. good luck

[iAmCaffeine]

You can stop assuming I'm ignorant of everything you're saying now.