Quote:
Originally Posted by thejeff
While it's certainly within their rights not to and in fact very rare for even independent game designers to do so, I'm curious why not. Or why you wouldn't, since you can't speak for them.
Assuming it's done after they release their new game, have no intentions of returning to the code base and do so with all the appropriate disclaimers of no support, etc. Where is the harm?
|
A lot of reasons to do with intellectual property. Separating the content from the code base would be a difficult thing to do and would mean gutting the game rather thoroughly, and that would be an absolute requirement if I were to release something like this in the hypothetical situation where it was under my control. I couldn't care less about the actual coding mechanics as such, since it is only a tool to implement functionality (and tools can be built or rebuilt if necessary), but I would not have the same attitude toward the creative control and where that was taken.
Releasing it to the public domain would mean that anyone could do anything with it. Unacceptable.
Think of it this way: I made the Dom3 DB and I wish to be acknowledged as its author, but if someone uses that for something else, as long as they credit me for my work, I couldn't care less about it. It's a tool that basically anyone could have put together.
But the stuff in
this thread is different. The things I wrote there were inspired by the content stuff in Dominions, but it is
my work entirely. Nobody else could have come up with those same things in the same sense that anyone could have built a Dom3 DB. Anyone wants to lay any sort of claim at all to those (except Kristoffer who gets credit since his work is used in the foundations) and use it for whatever, they get to do so only over my lifeless corpse.
Does that make my position any clearer to you? I don't know what JK and KO think of this issue as such, but you asked why I would not release the stuff. There you have it.