Yeahlight,
Sorry to hear about the drama with some of your devs who decided to steal work that they had not contributed much into at all.
I haven't looked at your source yet, but it sounds like it wouldn't be hard to use the opcodes and structure you have identified and add them to the EQEmu source to allow your client to run with the current EQEmu source. If so, maybe by combining the work of you and your team with the EQEmu open source project, it can work out to your benefit.
Personally, I see little reason to have multiple closed source projects all based on an open source one, especially when the community isn't very large to begin with. Some have split off in the past to push a very customized world, such as SoD, but even they are considering rejoining the open source project, at least to an extent. By being able to combine the work of multiple separate projects/teams, I think it will be a better over-all experience for everyone from Server Admin/Devs to Players.
Probably one of the bigger problems I see with closed source projects is that sometimes a ton of work/fixes/improvements can be put into the closed source that is based on our Open Source code, and for no specific reason, the closed source project comes to a halt or just never gets completed. And, by the time the source is released (if ever), both the Open Source code and the closed source have deviated so much that it would be a ton of work to attempt a proper code merge.
The EQEmu Open Source project might not be open to every single custom code submission or idea that people come up with, but I do think we can be pretty flexible as long as it something that multiple servers could make use of and isn't impacting to any current setups. I am pretty sure that much of the work you have done on EQC would be things that could probably been added directly into the EQEmu source to improve the emu for your client and in some cases probably all clients.
I know that submitting code through the forums isn't the most fun or efficient way to do it, but I also think that the EQEmu team keeps a close eye on people who do submit code and if they meet the right criteria, they can be added to the team to have direct SVN access to make it much easier to do updates. Then, as long as the updates are good and not breaking other clients or causing crashes (at least not too often), we are pretty flexible about what can be added.
BTW, I saw a video of those bolt spells you got working on Youtube and they looked quite amazing. Nice work!
|