Reasons against Thread - PlaneShift

Here is five reasons why I would never recommend anyone to contribute to PlaneShift as a developer or artist. Please note that this is all my own view, and might be a bit off or just plain wrong. If that's the case, please notify me so I can correct my mistakes. I don't mean to be insulting, I just want to warn against getting involved with this project.

1. The lead developer has his own specific mind and can be hard to get along with if you want to realize your own ideas.
2. While the source code is technically open source, contributions from non team members are rarely acknowledged by the dev team.
3. If you want to be in the dev team, you'll have to sign their proprietary, non open source license.
4. The code has been in the works for over ten years, thus has naturally become a mess. Necessary rewrites happen late or not at all.
5. Every contribution that is not in source code will be owned by a company (which mostly only exists on paper, if any).

Another issue I have with PlaneShift is that the game doesn't force an age limit, or realize measures for addiction prevention. Nor does it warn the player about these kinds of things. I have proof that a person I know had an average daily playtime of at least 16.5 hours over the course of several months. Note that the client usually crashes randomly every few hours, so you can't just start it in the morning and leave it running until you go to bed. In my opinion, the team of GMs should have watched this number and limited this person's playtime. But oh well, maybe that's just me.

derula wrote: Here is five reasons why I would never recommend anyone to contribute to PlaneShift as a developer or artist. Please note that this is all my own view, and might be a bit off or just plain wrong. If that's the case, please notify me so I can correct my mistakes. I don't mean to be insulting, I just want to warn against getting involved with this project.

1. The lead developer has his own specific mind and can be hard to get along with if you want to realize your own ideas.
2. While the source code is technically open source, contributions from non team members are rarely acknowledged by the dev team.
3. If you want to be in the dev team, you'll have to sign their proprietary, non open source license.
4. The code has been in the works for over ten years, thus has naturally become a mess. Necessary rewrites happen late or not at all.
5. Every contribution that is not in source code will be owned by a company (which mostly only exists on paper, if any).

Another issue I have with PlaneShift is that the game doesn't force an age limit, or realize measures for addiction prevention. Nor does it warn the player about these kinds of things. I have proof that a person I know had an average daily playtime of at least 16.5 hours over the course of several months. Note that the client usually crashes randomly every few hours, so you can't just start it in the morning and leave it running until you go to bed. In my opinion, the team of GMs should have watched this number and limited this person's playtime. But oh well, maybe that's just me.

1. Depends I saw a lot of weird ideas which would make the online experience dangerous from a real life point of view, like hiding names. Not all ideas are good, not all are practical and enjoyable and several time it was possible to do what you say it's not possible.
2. Extremely wrong. If you are really doing contributions (there are only two or three people who ever did that since I'm around) then most probably they will be accepted. Obviously I require a certain standard regarding code style, comments and hardcoding (this is forbidden now). But you'll get a comment in that case.
3. If you want to contribute to art you need to give art to the project, maybe when the final version will be released it will be under a free license but this license originated from people making art and then requesting a take down of the materials, and it happened also recently with people who didn't do it. So we had to trash all the work done and start from scratch. So essentially this is to protect the project itself. For code there is copyright assignment to not end in the problem of having to contact hundred of contributors to update the licensing, plus it makes more clear to people that they cannot withdraw gpl code, like some requests which happened before this license was enstabilished. GNU does the same and they just bumped GPLV2 to GPLV3 for GCC.
4. Just like any opensource project which has been around for long. Didn't the linux kernel recently get the removal of the big kernel lock for SMP systems? it's normal evolution.
5. It exists you can request the incorporation documentation from texas,USA.

I've played commercial games and I didn't find neither of those: no requests for age (and the weird case in which they ask your age it's a simple put your birtdate and there is no verification outside that) and no limits to prevent addiction, actually I've seen the behavior to increase the addiction and have you spend thousand of euro over virtual items. And this is increasingly extremely pushed forward from Free to Play games (after all that's their only income).
The client doesn't randomly crash each 2 hours, I had it running for days without issues(even weeks), we don't kick idle people or flag them as so in any way. Plus if a client crashes it's perfectly possible to make it automatically reconnect.

I thought it might be an interesting mention that weltall89 recently resigned from a leading PlaneShift developer position because of reason #1.