Nalates, I see it being useful to Cyan, as they, being the developer who has used and developed with that engine for many years now, have knowledge of it, and can support it. And, they can offer premium support at a fee. Its been done before with a lot of success, actually. Its quite a common way of generating income from an open source release, and that income also allows for further developement, of their own projects.
It could also be useful to Cyan in the same way that Open Sourcing the Quake 3 engine was to id Software... Over the years they'd simply "lost" (I believe that was the term they used) the source code for their Mac port... so, put simply, the mac port could no longer be supported, at all. So, that left some customers out in the cold. Guess what happened pretty soon after Quake 3 was open sourced? Somebody made a new mac port, and submitted it to id Software, allowing them to (officially) support Mac users once again. Things like this do happen when games are open sourced, programmers who believe in open source will often do rather nice things for developers who support the open source community. id Software had one guy pretty much port every single one of their games for very little, and last I heard, still does port newer games to Linux, and iirc, Mac. (He may even do it for free, but I cannot remember).
It benefits Cyan in other ways, too. Cyan will be able to use our enhancements, if they're sensible about their licensing, for future games, too, saving them cycles, and money. (Note to Cyan: Please, be sensible in your licensing, LGPL or (modern) BSD-licenses will benefit both you and the community greatly, don't squander your chance, here.)
This open sourcing does not spell doom for Cyan at all, not even close, infact, it could be massively beneficial to them, if they go about this sensibly.
EDIT: Perhaps I should also add to this some other notes.
Be aware that Uru-fans may even become a minority in the coming open source. Some people will not know about Uru, or even care about Uru. They will still be a good thing to have.
Exotic opinions will be voiced, and sometimes loudly. And again, this is a good thing.
Be prepared for an influx of new blood, not necessarily "Uru"-based new blood, but, rather Plasma-based new blood.
Keep in mind the balance of "power" (by that I mean dominant opinions of the community) in the future may be vastly different to what is the currently accepted norm. The new will perhaps outnumber the "old guard".
It isn't going to just be about the Uru community anymore. The Uru community will still exist, perhaps, but, there will likely be a greater "Plasma" community. And some of the, how do I put this, "militantly" pro-cyan-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else group, whoever you may interpret or not interpret those to be, will have to get used to this. As its been said a number of times in this thread, it isn't about us anymore.
The landscape of this community is going to change, and I hope people realise this. Its not a bad thing, actually its a good thing. A very good thing, indeed.
EDIT2:
Also, Nalates, Plasma is nothing like SL, and it never will be. It just doesn't work in the same way. You can't necessarily take what you may've learnt about creating content in SL, and make it work in Plasma, without having to mostly start again from scratch. About all that you could use from your knowledge of SL is either textures, to some degree, and modelling in a 3d program, that might've learnt playing with sculpties. And can I note? Sculpties are realy frecking weird, and if you're really great at making sculpties, you still might have some trouble making content for Plasma. I've played a little with both sides of things, and to be honest, there isn't really a one-to-one comparison of content creation for SL or similiar things, and content creation for a game engine like Plasma. They really don't work the same way.
EDIT3: fixed some sentence fragments.
EDIT4: Wow, I'm really adding to this more and more. Also regarding ODE vs Physx and Havok... ODE is probably developing and /releasing/ features far faster than Physx and Havok. You do realise that a number of open source libraries are commonly used in the commericial games? Infact, Uru last I remember used a bunch, too. By "Uru" I'm referring to Uru: Complete Chronicles. Neverwinter Nights used them, too... Lots of games use open source libraries. Now, commericial libraries tend to do a few things. One such thing is they tend to hold back on releasing new features until they have enough to warrant an entirely new release of the product, and requiring a new purchase for anyone using the older version, to get this brand new and improved version. That way, they make money, and really, that's what they're there to do, they are a business, after all. Open source libraries tend to just release features as they're done, and tested, mostly. (Depending on if its the stable or development verion of the library, generally) Bugfixes and security updates tend to come along as and when they're done. Another thing to note about the general work ethic of open source developers is the mantra "Release early, release often." its an important thing to note. I'd imagine the development of ODE has taken less time, than that of Havok, of Physx, though I could be mistaken.
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