I just wanted to mention that I find it ironic. A couple years ago, jase suggested we include Creative Commons licensing in RPoL and there was a hailstorm of (often pretty nasty)
Oh no you didn'ts, threats to leave the site, and a whole lot of
over my dead bodyism going around.
It's likely that those suggseting open source for RPoL weren't really involved in that, or weren't active here at the time, but still: the memory is pretty amusing since most GMs would be unwilling to give up their project to "free to use with attribution" but jase's source code is likely looked at with a fairly different eye.
Anyway, I'd not be in favor of current RPoL going OpenSource at this point.
Reasons I don't think RPoL needs a host more coders:
- The site runs fine as it is.
- While updates might not be fast, the site is perfectly well functional and does everything needed to run an online game.
- There are no stop bugs, and none that lose GMs' and players' information.
Personally, I think opensource for RPoL is a bad idea: I do not want the "tyranny of the masses" imposing the patches and features
they want on my beloved site. RPoL could never again add another feature and I'd be perfectly OK with that. I like that what goes into the site is very tightly controlled.
OpenSource works for some things. I use GIMP, Inkscape, and OpenOffice very happily, myself. I don't think it's suited to this site, though there is nothing stopping those interested in forming their own open source pbp board and making it perfect in their eyes. As mentioned: RPoL's code is not the valuable thing -- it's the userbase. Being opensource, or not, doesn't much change that. I'd not want RPoL to go open source just to satisfy those who want to do an open source pbp board that they have a sufficient userbase to use their work.
As Shannara mentioned, however, jase has in the past asked for coding and database assistance and has received very, very little by way of response. If you contact him by rMail you can likely get more details on any help he needs at this time.
This message was last edited by a moderator at 13:57, Mon 30 Aug 2010.