Camen Design Forum

The Theft of Creativity

append delete Alfredo

http://camendesign.com/mind_heist

I know this post was added a while ago now, but I still wanted to add some comments. In particular, the stuff Kroc wrote about Minecraft. I'll leave the Adobe vs. openness debate for another time and place.

“Look at Minecraft. It has completely rewritten the rulebook on releasing a game.”

Perhaps, but Minecraft certainly wasn't the first to employ this tactic. And whenever someone mentions Minecraft to make a point about the possibility of indie developers to be hugely successful with their games, I can't help but think of lottery advertising. Yes, people can quit their job and start spending money on the lottery in the hope of becoming filthy rich. It happens, but how often? No one can deny Minecraft's success, but there are literally tons and tons of great indie games (some really open source none the less) out there that never get the attention they deserve. Minecraft is simply a rare exception.

“The size of the community that surrounds Minecraft is just mind-blowing. The things people are building. [...] All of this even without a mod API yet [...] Community driven innovation is outpacing the developers.”

Yes, it is astonishing to say the least. But not in the way you mean. Whereas games such as The Elder Scrolls actually allow and encourage users to create mods/plugins with TES, the modding community for Minecraft started because the game had huge amounts of potential but Notch couldn't fully deliver it on his own.

“The success of Minecraft’s mods, and the extra community they have driven, is a product of Minecraft’s source code being visible to all—it’s written in Java.”

I might be missing something here, but how is the source code "visible to all"? You need to decompile a bunch of classes with obscure names to see the source code. This doesn't make Java code any more visible than compiled AS3 code. But while you're praising the openness of Java, you're complaining about how Flash can only create closed results. Any compiled language creates "closed" results and it's up to the developer to decide how open they want to create their work. Furthermore, it's not like all web developers are happy with the fact that their code is out in the open. Otherwise there wouldn't be a market for Javascript obfuscators.

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append delete #1. cthom06

“I might be missing something here, but how is the source code "visible to all"? You need to decompile a bunch of classes with obscure names to see the source code.”

s/obscure/obfuscated/. They aren't even obscure until you de-obfuscate.

Minecraft source is hardly any more visible than Photoshop (they both just have to be decompiled). It's just a bit simpler to work with :B. When [if?] Mojang finally releases the source to mod developers (as promised a while back) these statements will become valid.

append delete #2. Kroc

I’ll admit it’s not a very good article :(

append delete #3. cthom06

“I’ll admit it’s not a very good article :(”

I disagree, leave out the Minecraft example (the two paragraphs after the quote?) and it's a pretty excellent article.

append delete #4. Alfredo

“s/obscure/obfuscated/. They aren't even obscure until you de-obfuscate.

Minecraft source is hardly any more visible than Photoshop (they both just have to be decompiled). It's just a bit simpler to work with :B. When [if?] Mojang finally releases the source to mod developers (as promised a while back) these statements will become valid. ”

Sorry, I meant the file names (aa.class, ab.class, ...) are obscure, not the class names.
The comparison with PSD files is odd. You're talking about a binary file format which is fully documented for 3rd party developers. It's about as open as it can get for file formats (unlike ALAC for example).
If Kroc's point was, with regards to Minecraft at least, that it's so popular with the modding community because of it's open code, I'd say that's simply not true. The point should have been that despite the closed nature of the project, it attracted creative people who broke those barriers and managed to overcome the limitations imposed on them.
Those limitations will disappear in the future when Notch releases the source code, that's true. But it also means that unlike what Kroc states, openness isn't necessarily defined by the chosen tools. I've created a fair share of projects in Flash, some of which are open source. I can serve video on the web using Flash Player, benefit from some advantages it currently offers over HTML5 video and still decide to make downloading the video easy for users. While web developers may decide to obfuscate their code so it's not readily viewable by others.

append delete #5. Neolander

“The comparison with PSD files is odd.”

It was not so much with PSD files than with the Photoshop binary, I think.

For the rest, I agree with your post :)

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