On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 23:48 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 23:09, Ric Moore wrote: > > > My original point is that if something is broken and someone can fix > > it... it may help others, in unforeseen ways, to try to improve things a > > bit which may come full circle back to you to improve your own life. > > If you really believe that, why apply the GPL restrictions? Let > people reuse it and improve it any way they can. X probably > wouldn't exist as a GPL'd work - or NFS, yet they now are > available for everyone. > So no one can take the work, rip it, stamp their name on it and demand money for no effort or even slap a copyright on it. You know there are people who would do that. I don't want to be looking for get-back, I have had to acquire interventions to short circuit losing my temper. > > I > > have no problem with the GPL on that basis. For me, it keeps it free and > > Bill Gates can't get his hands on it. <evil grin> Ric > > Even Bill Gates sometimes does charity work... Bill is a master poker player. It takes a degree of objectification in someone in order to take another's money away from them, because they are bold enough to step up to the plate and play odds against each other. It's the winners and losers thing all over. IMHO, there is a degree of bad juju going on when two people call it entertainment to try to chump each other off, take money from the undeserving (loser) and call the experience enjoyable. There is charity and there is charity work... there is a difference. One is writing a check, which in itself is not a bad thing, while the other is ladling the soup. > The more interesting issue is what happens when the 2 idealistic > pursuits you've mentioned clash? That is, do you deprive the > people you would like to help with this software by making a system > that cannot use technologies under different licensing (mp3/mpeg > and many others) because of the GPL restrictions or will you > condescend to something like perl's dual license to allow it to > be improved in any way someone would like? Why use the word condescend, Les? With the $100 laptop, we will not be dealing with rocket science nor need anything proprietary... that's the point of that device. It's how RedHat / MIT designed it. The game will be fairly primitive... sprites, etc. Streaming video and wireless networking will consume a chunk of cpu and memory to process, given the device's limitations. There will be no frills past that. As far as anyone improving it, the system has a live co-dependency between server and client. You can't dink with only one of the two, without wrecking the other. It's not a single-user console game, it is a network system. The game by itself would be fairly mundane without the video content carried by it. We have people working on the video content now. I have only one developer working on the game and he's pretty much all we need at this point, just to have a proof of concept. The thing to develop and improve, that will take a lot of people, is the videos, the content and the progression of game based events based on individual test scores that each client is processed through in the beginning and followups periodically occur to track the client's progress. That last part is best left between the behaviorists (we have 6 of them already) and the clients. Without the inmates reality checks, the whole thing will come off as totally irrelevant, so much duck-quacks and ineffective. So, what would the average individual hacker contribute to the program without being involved in the development of it and having a full understanding of the elements involved? Not a lot I would suspect. Practically everyone involved at this point is approved by NC DOC to enter their facilities, for program purposes. That's a pretty involved and lengthy process the casual potential contributor just might not subscribe to, although I invite anyone to go to their state DOC to do so, if they are interested. Please contact me off list if you feel that you are really serious about contributing and feel you have some manner of dog in this fight. Later on the client can be improved for public use connected to servers on the net. My point is that the game is open source. The server guts is all open source. It is off-the-shelf Fedora and already GPL'd. The development is seemingly closed as it's a royal pain to get on the other side of the razor wire where the action takes place. County jails are easier to get access to, but that population is always in transition and may not be there the next time you go to interview them for context. Without knowledge of that arena, it's next to impossible to contribute with any degree of understanding of what needs to take place. Condescend in there and some gorilla will rip your arm off and beat you to death with it. <g> Relate to the circumstance and a miracle takes place... you find a human being sitting across from you, that got into a pickle and really wants to learn about getting out and staying out of the brine. I know many personally and I respect them very much. A few are like family for me. I am sponsored by an ex-felon, who is my mentor, founder of Community Success Initiative (CSI) and best friend. We have similar stories. As I mentioned, what you hear/see on TV are the pathological cases who are most likely to never get out. There is nothing sadder... as they cannot be allowed to create any more victims, and they know it. So, they have been discarded and the value of life becomes reduced to the most primitive. On a positive note, they are a very small minority yet they are all you hear about. Yes, we do live in a fear-based society, IMHO. That's where the relevant testing comes in. That will be huge and I know next to nothing about behavioral modeling. I'm trying to get in touch with SAS and get some interest from them. The MMPI test is kinda old and not always as fair a model as is needed, from what I've been told by behaviorists. So, I'm shopping for the best and hope to see if they will participate. There's a degree of social blackmail involved... don't participate and just maybe someone without treatment may wreck your house if you're lucky, or wreck you if you are not. Participate and maybe the treated individual will decide to stop/switch and walk by. It always comes down to individual choices and better choices are made with enough good information, new perceptions and some acquired empathy added in to salt the stew. The whole thing is fairly simple on the surface. So simple that I boggle at our society that hasn't demanded it be done in the past. I mean, damn! Most inmates/convicts get out! I took a penology course from UNC which basically said what we have don't work. Just write that down on the final exam for a 4.0. Why would it take a pile of ex-cons, ghetto ministries, halfway houses and case workers to get this crate on the road? Oh yeah, and some middle class parents who get the shock of their lives when junior was locked up and are appalled at what they have seen. We had a couple at the round table today in that circumstance. It could be any of you. They did their best... and failed. They've stepped up, admitted it and are willing to do whatever they can. That took guts... raw guts. He's getting out soon and they asked questions and sought guidance. Sometimes it does take a tribe to raise a child. Sometimes it takes a tribe to raise a parent, too. Getting all of this into a computer will be a large challenge. The GPL? No challenge at all, it's an answer to a prayer, -according to my perceptions-. Ric
