Announcing the Ubuntu Gaming Team

In recognition of the value of FOSS gaming, the Ubuntu Gaming Team has been formed of mutual benefit to Ubuntu and FOSS gaming. As of today, the team is now open for anyone to join and participate in. Working towards improving FOSS games and developing its community will turn a significant barrier against Ubuntu adoption into an appealing reason to switch.

The Ubuntu Gaming Team will work to address the obstacles hindering growth in FOSS gaming such as the need for effective distributed content management or significant investment in free content development in order to promote FOSS gaming through Ubuntu and Ubuntu through FOSS gaming. New ideas are encouraged and appreciated.

FOSS gaming is important to Ubuntu as a lack of quality games is one of the most cited reasons preventing users from switching from Windows. Gamers, who currently feed off of the proprietary software model, represent a large and valuable user base. They will not even begin to gradually migrate to Ubuntu until their needs are met. They are very capable of understanding the ideological and technical benefits of using a free operating system like Ubuntu, and are often interested in switching, but higher value is placed on high quality gaming and the entire demographic will not budge until the pragmatic advantages of open source actualize through FOSS gaming.

The team is dedicated to FOSS gaming, and will not push for commercial games  on Linux as significant effort is already put into the development of Wine and pressuring video game publishers to port their work to Linux. Once FOSS gaming reaches its "tipping point", code and content will be easily reused to foster the development of new games and innovative ideas in gaming. The Ubuntu Gaming Team fills a great need for an organized effort to support FOSS gaming.

Anyone interested may join the Launchpad Team and subscribe to the mailing list there, help build the team wiki, and chat in #ubuntu-gaming on irc.freenode.net!

Sorry, Planet Ubuntu!

As (hopefully most of you haven't) may have noticed, i had a little trouble with Planet Ubuntu a few days ago. First, while trying to upload my hackergotchi (my avatar/icon thingy), i accidentally uploaded the HUGE version so anybody who visited the planet during the approximately fifteen minutes before it updated again was greeted by a giant image of my face filling up more than the entire width of the page. Frightening, i know. On top of that, some trouble with my feed causes any updates to posts, even just alering labels, causes the post time to change, resulting in 17 of my posts reappearing on the planet consecutively. I've figured out that this is because even though the time of post on Blogger does not change, Feedburener updates it. This is really inconvenient as i'd like to be able to add/remove some of the labels on my posts, so if you can help, please reply to my thread on the help forum or in the comments of this post! Thanks

Update: I've had complaints of this because of edits to my recent post-install guide and still haven't found a solution. 

A Poem for Humans

Clockwork

They are clockwork.
They can never be like us.
We think. We learn. We feel.
They compute.

A machine knows nothing
of love,
of friendship,
of loss.

They are not self-aware.
They have no will,
no sense of purpose,
no hopes or desires.

Always limited by their programming,
They can never be conscious;
They cannot imagine;
They do not dream.

A machine cannot compose a song,
dance,
write a poem,
or paint a masterpiece.

They will never understand,
They will never know
What it means to be,
To be alive.

Machines are too simple.
Computers will never be human.
Robots will never be autonomous.
Androids will never live.

We are human, yet
What are we
but clockwork,
but machines?

FOSS Gaming Needs Distributed Content Development

Looks like FOSS gaming needs more than just promotion and financial support. After my last post about it, i recieved a very insightful email from Tim Blokdijk since my comment form was broken, and i thought it would be worth sharing with all of you. Seems the biggest barrier to FOSS gaming development isn't code, but content.

I can't comment on your blog but I still feel a need to respond to your “Linux needs games, games need you” posting.

Up to about a year ago I was quite involved with the spring project, springrts.com one of the more successful open source “games” out there.

To me the nr 1. challenge/problem is that “we” the open source people more or less cracked the problem of distributed code development. It's all text based and a lot of focus and effort has been put into that “way” of working. But it's different for content, as you cannot “diff” a picture or a blender file. Distributed content development is a pain in the ass. Spring has loads of content but it's very difficult to get a distributed team to work on integrating all this into one style that can compete with commercial games.

There is progress, the creative commons licenses makes it easier to do things as the GPL and other traditional licenses are to much focused on code. Broadband internet makes it easier to send around large binary source files. The 3D drivers for Linux are improving.. Gimp actually starts to get useful so artists are more open to the idea to look beyond Photoshop for a second. Wings3D is stable enough and useful enough to get people modelling. And Ton is finally committing himself to a gui rewrite for Blender. All these things used to be big blockers but it's still not practical to start a distributed content development project.

The only real successful open source content projects are “Elephants Dream”, “Big Bug Bunny” and “Yo Franky!”. But that involved getting 10+ people together for 6 months to work on a project. And even then they had problems managing the content files. They were using svn but had to use a small webapp to keep track who was editing what files.

A service like launchpad would need “a lot” of work to make it practical to develop content in the same way as it's possible to develop code. Your constantly running into/pushing the envelope. Dpkg repository's are not designed to cope with "source" files of many gigabytes. Executable files that need to be binary identical (or very close to) to allow people to play multiplayer games (across win/lin/mac platforms). And there are more issues like preventing cheating.. and stuff.

I personally think that you really need a company as canonical purely dedicated to game and content development to get to a level where you can speak of “reaching a tipping point”. The Blender institute is a contender but they lack a large amount of hard cash to accelerate the field.

So there you have it. Can the Blender Institute take on the challenge? Will Canonical step up to the plate?

Embedded Comment Form Fixed

I'm not sure how long this has been broken, but i got a couple of emails from people who tried to comment but couldn't. It's a little upsetting that all this time i've been calling for comments but people were unable to leave them so now i've lost a lot of potential comments (if two people were motivated enough to go out of their way to email me, i'm sure many more would have commented). It's fixed now, so sombody hurry up and post "first!"

Open Source FriendFeed

FriendFeed, the coolest app no one uses, should be the new Twitter, but i still have one problem with it: it's closed-source. Identi.ca is open source, so i'm using that until FriendFeed releases their code. I posted to their feeback room proposing they adopt APGL (respond if you're in support!) and someone had the idea that as a for-profit, private company, they would never free their source code. I don't see why keeping their code proprietary protects their profits at all since they don't make money by selling it and Reddit is a great example of open sourcing success. So, why don't they? 

Electric Vehicle Conversions for the Masses?

Wikipedia has a growing list of the many upcoming and production electric cars, scooters, as well as motorcycles (even open source projects), but what about the millions of gas vehicles already on the road? There doesn't seem to be any single good central source of information for electric car conversions.

It's hard to do conversions due to the unique form of different vehicles, but the waste generated by abandoned vehicles is huge, not to mention buying a new car is a big investment. What auto shops are willing to do conversions, and how much do they (over)charge? Is DIY the way to go, and where can you get everything you need? Most importantly, is it even worth it to convert your car or is it cheaper to just buy a new one? Seems this is a niche waiting to be tapped.

Linux needs games, games need you

It's no surprise that gaming is one of the areas lagging most in the Free Software world. Fanatics will say that yes there are good FOSS games, but the truth is, they're nothing compared to the plethora of proprietary options for Windows. The current open source games won't hold over people who crave the latest games that are being cranked out. Free Software emerges and evolves out of necessity and innovation. It's hard to see a real need for gaming, but better games could offer a lot for the spread of GNU/Linux adoption.

Games are already cited as being the only factor holding many many people back from switching over from Windows completely. Think about it-- if FOSS gaming reached the "tipping point" and games were compareable to the newest proprietary titles, the fact that users could have similar games for free would be a huge selling point for Linux.

The world of gamers is HUGE. There are individual players, groups of friends, competitions, and professional gaming leagues. Gamers play on whatever platform has their games. This can be exploited for Linux. Right now, tournaments can be held for games like Nexuiz (donate!), and in the future when games are attractive enough to adopt Linux for the games, the world of gamers will start to migrate. Until then, they won't even budge. We can't hope to even chip at them until Linux gaming improves.

What can you do? Contribute! Linux needs games, and games need you. Of course, it's a good idea to support and FOSS products you use, but games are in serious need of support. If you're a programmer, you can obviously help with that. For the average anybody, you can download and try the game, submit bug reports, or at least send in a donation. Even if it's just $5, it makes difference.

Here's my request to you: Donate $25 to FOSS gaming. You could donate all $25 to one game, or $5 to five different games, or whatever you like. Just google a list of top FOSS games to try. It's easy, and gaming needs a boost...and Linux needs gaming. So spread this far and wide and give Linux the games it so desperately wants and needs!

Update 2009.04.16: I recieved a very insightful email response you can read here.

(Google) Customer Support Issues

This isn't a problem specific to Google, but it just happened to bother me while waiting on these two help requests which to this day have still not been solved and Google is a company i would've expected to have come up with some brilliant solution to this issue.

Most issues are from users who don't know what they're doing, but for issues that are on the company's end, it's almost impossible to get them fixed. Facebook deals with this in a great way...they make it impossible to find a way to contact them. There needs to be some way to sort out the issues that are no on the user's end and then prioritize them. Anybody have some brilliant ideas? Post them in the comments!