On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
I am curious about what ideas of open source that software like punkbuster could be considered to be actively fighting against.
The GNU software sets forth a couple of simple rights of what I like to call Liberated Software (avoids that whole free beer concept). You should be free to use the software for any purpose. You should be free to modify code. There's more, but those are the two might become sticklers.
Well, you are still "at liberty" to modify the game code all you want. You are still "at liberty" to use the software for any purpose. The issue at hand is whether the license guarantees that you should be able to play nice with other people after you modify the code. If you are working on a word processor and you discover a bug in a certain file format and choose to "fix" the bug in your software - in no way are other word editors obliged to fix the same bug if they want to be compatible with each other. If you want to write a plug-in for X program and refuse to follow the standards set forth to write the said plug-in ... should the developers of X program guarantee that your plug-in will work?
I could come up with more examples if you would like, but I think you probably see where I am going with this ...