Nicely said, Harvey!
We all love Crossfire... it really is an excellent work of art. And the worst thing that the dickheads did was to be dickheads. If they had built a "greatest hits of Freelancer" mod, with credit and permissions, then everybody would be happy about it rather than pissed off.
In the past, sites like TheLancersReactor did a great job of learning how to mod and sharing the knowledge. Each new modder contributed to the pool of knowledge. We are all here, today, because of that openness. Without it, Freelancer would be remembered like Wing Commander -- a game that many of us played, but few have played it in this century.
That openness helps the success of the mods, too. Some of these mods have 100 times the number of downloads as the number of Multi-Players on the servers. In other words, there are a significant number of SP players... maybe the MP folks are more vocal and know each other better, but there are a lot more silent single players out there.
As one of those SP players, I can say that half of the fun of Single Player is in fiddling with our own mods ... often ON TOP OF A MAJOR MOD (such as Crossfire). Maybe not every SP player does that, but once a person begins to use mods, it is just a small step to creating them.
Mind you, I am not talking about people creating mods on the scale of Crossfire. I just mean a little fine tuning, such as increasing the difficulty to 2.0 so that those lame-ass Dom K'Vash gunships will be a bit of challenge (just kidding!!). 
The main reason that ANYBODY has any interest in this seven year old game is BECAUSE it is relatively easy to mod, and because people have had success in modding it, and because they have made their mods open.
So I would love to see Crossfire and Swat evolve into the kind of open community that made them both possible.
The great part is that OP would get a huge increase in exposure while giving up nothing. He owns non-exclusive intellectual property rights and he would continue to own those same rights if he were to use a Gnu-like open license. If anybody used any of his work, they would have to advertise OP and Swat in order to do it! You cannot buy advertising that is that good.
More people would have more fun and OP would be better known. People playing other mods would see his name with Chris Roberts, Digital Anvil, and Microsoft... that is a powerful place to be.
But it is not really any of my business.
I can voice my opinion, and hope that some of it may someday influence Swat's growth for the better, but I am not a part of Swat, nobody asked for my opinion beyond creating an open opinion forum, and the only thing I own is the installation of Freelancer on my PC. So I can cast a vote, but it is not a large vote. And it is not even a democracy. 
I know that OP wants to protect his work and, dammit, people should not present artwork as their own without giving credit to the artists, ever. The level of effort in Crossfire is so extraordinary that it might be worth six figures... if only OP owned all of it. But, as you say, Microsoft owns the majority of it -- including part of his extensions to THEIR files. So it is not a matter of protecting something of monetary value -- it is more about protecting honor, integrity, and OP/Swat's reputations (things that are more important than money).
The sad fact is that the Internet makes it all too easy to copy songs, videos, pictures, prose, and other kinds of artwork, including games. Many people have tried to stop copying -- and have invested huge amounts of money it the effort -- but nobody has ever had any significant success in "protecting" computer files that have been published somewhere. Most efforts to prevent copying just create bugs, incompatibilities, and hassles for users ... all of which we see here.
These are some of the reasons that the open source movement is growing, rather than shrinking. There is room in the world for both proprietary work and open source, but an increasing number of projects are having tremendous success with openness. And, no matter what any of us might wish, there is no profit in making something proprietary if you do not own it completely (or, at least, have a resale license).
Nevertheless, this is not really any of our business! This thread is full of people voicing their opinions (including me). But OP, in his sometimes cryptically-brief way, said that "this is not a topic for discussion". If I understand him correctly, he means that he is NOT ASKING FOR ADVICE ABOUT WHAT HE SHOULD DO.
It does not really matter who owns how much of what. It only matters that Crossfire exists because of OP. He built Crossfire, he lets people use it, so anybody that uses Crossfire ought to be happy that he made it, and STOP TELLING HIM WHAT TO DO.
The rest of this thread is just all of us trying to support OP (and each other) while blowing off some steam.
None of us want to see another Freelancer site explode like TLR. We all want Crossfire and OP to be healthy and to prosper.
Beyond that, OP gets to choose how he wants to handle... well... pretty much everything!
While I hope that OP will someday open up Crossfire (and I think that it will do him far more good than he realizes), I respect his right to do things as he sees fit.
All things considered, OP has a pretty good track record for making sound decisions. Nobody is perfect, and I mean this as a compliment: Crossfire is as good as it is, in part, because OP is a bit of a stubborn hammerhead. And I mean that nicely... if he did everything that everybody told him to do, then Crossfire would be a mess! So let him choose his own path. He has good taste, and he has done a terrific job so far.
Quote
Originally posted by harvey032186
Hey, I just found Crossfire the other day by accident 
I'm looking at making my own mod, was poking around for inspiration/ideas, saw screenies of CF and have, uh, decided I needed to "research" this mod Seriously, kudos to everybody who participated in this. I haven't had a chance to install yet, cause of work, but I'll be in-game shortly...
Anyway, the reason I post here is this. Aside from a few scattered servers, there is a dwindling number of people playing this game. I personally I'm looking for some way to attract more people to FL so we can all keep playing. Here's the thing, though.
There is a strong tendency around the FL community to "horde". This is not the easiest game in the world to mod, and many different people have come up with many different wonderful ideas. However, many of them have the attitude "this is MINE" and "we've built this from the ground up that's how it's gonna stay", etc, etc.
If society as a whole worked on these principles we'd have never left the stone age. Why does everyone have to reinvent the wheel everytime they want to do something? For example, I have NO EARTHLY IDEA how to do most the stuff y'all have done. I would be hard pressed to even figure out how you did it TO steal it But suppose I wanted to use some of those ideas, you expect ME to spend years researching and experimenting just because YOU did? How can anything progress at that rate?
I gathered the whole point of CrossFire was to demonstrate what FL was capable of, that it can still compete. What's the point of doing all this if you aren't going to let other people learn and use it, too? Most people are not outlandishly wonderful modelers, effects guys, coders, etc. If they are, it's usually only one of the above. If they can't use somebody else's stuff, at least in part, they probably are not going to be able to do much without a massive team of people with multiple talents.
And as someone mentioned earlier, what happens when you lose interest in CF? It ceases to progress? It gets pulled of the server and mod sites? Taken very far at all this attitude just becomes very selfish and stupid. It is a COMPLEMENT that some else was so impressed by your work that they wanted to include it in their project. I'd be delighted if someone did that for me.
And again, FL is slowly dying. And you're wanting to disrupt and drive off people? Even if some of them are assholes, I'm sure a lot of them are not. All you'll end up doing is stirring up a lot of shit and both sides look pathetic and juvenile.
I'm not defending the guys that stole your work, they sound like dickheads, they should at least credit that they got/learned from you. It does however sound like you're making a far bigger deal out of them than is necessary. They are a private click out there, playing alone, and you're worrying about them. Forget it and find something productive to do before you piss of their hackers.
If you're not careful, you'll attract MicroSoft's attention and they'll close ALL OF YOU down. Cause guess what, in relation to this game, virtually EVERYTHING YOU DO belongs to them. Even your original work, aside from graphics, much of the coding and modifying you did to the base game, that base game belongs to THEM, as none of this would work with any OTHER game, that means it, also, belongs to THEM.
You've put a tremendous amount of work into this project, all of you have, but seriously, WTF? Lighten up. This ain't the end of world, and at the very least it further promotes FL. That's a GOOD THING. Don't be tight asses.
Display More
