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Maxis release SimCity source code

Posted on January 12th, 2008 in Open source, Gaming by admin

sims.JPG

Well, talking of that great phenomenon known as open source, as I was last week, it now seems that Maxis is joining the fray, by releasing the SimCity source code.

SimCity is a simulation and city-building personal computer game, designed by Maxis founder Will Wright, and it was first released in 1989, which makes it pretty longstanding. It is said that to do well at the game, you just have to think like a capitalist. The code was officially released on January 10th 2008, so now anyone can port it, run it, and modify the game. The code has been released under the GNU General Public Library (GPL) license, brought about by the fact that there are plans afoot to add the game to the OLPC XO Laptop, which at the moment runs entirely open source software.

Naturally EA, the game company that owns the rights to SimCity wants to protect its trademark, and so there have been a few changes to the original source code, and all references to SimCity have been replaced with “Micropolis”, which is appropriate really, given that this was the original working title for the game.

The Micropolis source code, which was originally written in C, has been recast into C++ classes, and integrated into Python. The code has been considerably cleaned up and bullet-proofed.

So now that the code is available, what are aficionados going to do with it? It is interesting to see that yet more top code is going open source, and it will be intriguing to see where the current trend leads.

Here to stay - open source software

Posted on January 5th, 2008 in Open source by admin

Richard Stallman

It is interesting to see that the open source movement is playing a prominent role in current innovations on the web.

In case you were wondering, open source is a philosophy about how software should be written, whereby the source code is available to the users. Additional meaning is added to the term by The Open Source Definition, written by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond, which states that one should not only be able to get the source code, but also have the right to use it. If other people don’t have the right to use it, then the license is considered to be a shared source license.

Anyone who wants to know more about the open source movement should take a look at Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was first presented as a talk in 1997, and is now available in book form, along with other essays. It is generally regarded as a manifesto for the open source movement.

Another prominent figure in the open source movement is Richard Stallman, who in 1983, launched the GNU Project, which created the free operating system Linux.

There are currently many examples of open source software that are improving the web no end. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is now one of the most popular browsers available, and is presenting a serious challenge to Internet Explorer. Open source is currently being embraced by the ubiquitous online social networking scene, where a set of common API’s for building social applications across the web are being established, such as Facebook’s open platform, and Google OpenSocial.

The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched in December, and an open ad network may be developed as an alternative to Google Adsense.

Overall, it looks as though the open source movement is here to stay, and has a lot to offer.