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!
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!
This is excellent news, I'm very interested on tracking this project.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think excellent FOSS gaming is a very worthy goal I think if you actually want gamers to use Ubuntu we need to work on getting commercial game companies to release their (non-FOSS) games on linux too. Encouragement should be given to companies like 2D boy who go to the trouble to release their games on linux too: http://2dboy.com/2009/02/12/world-of-goo-linux-version-is-ready/ .
ReplyDeleteWhile I applaud all initiatives to enhance gaming on ubuntu and linux, I agree with David about that there are plenty of companies that provide quality games and whose eyes need to be opened that there is actually a starving market here, that is willing to also pay for games.
ReplyDeleteThis is exciting! I hope the community will consider games such as Urban Terror, which technically isn't fully open source.
ReplyDeleteI think what needs to be developed is a single and unified gateway and way to check on servers. I think they have something like this for windows (steam?) Anyways, often times with games such as Alien Arena, etc. I can't find a server with enough people to play against. That's no fun!
I'd love to see some good FOSS games out there! But I guess I'm not your market, since I already switched to ubuntu 2 years ago. The price was a factor for me :-)
This sounds interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm an ubuntu user who's part of the Myst Online: Uru Live game community (that's that game that might go open source in the future), so I'm highly interested.
Also I made a game updater some time a go written in PHP.
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it needs to be made very clear that FOSS/Copyleft is not in contrast with being commercial. Commercial does not equal proprietary. It's harmful to those working on ethical copyleft business models to mix these terms.
ReplyDeleteWe are opposed to promoting proprietary software of any form for Ubuntu. It's unethical and in contrast with the goals of the Ubuntu project.
Very interesting.. I'm working on a freeware game (planned for the upcoming Pandora console, Linux and Windows) that I've held off on opensourcing because of difficulties acquiring media.. *Part* of the media is creative commons, but some isn't. It would be nice to work with someone who would be willing to produce media for creative-commons use, and then be able to release the game as open source.
ReplyDeleteGalactic Artifact, if anyone is interested...
All right! This is EXCELLENT news.
ReplyDeleteI myself have been looking at Free Software Gaming, it'd be great to possibly see a FOSS gaming community kind of becoming an alternative to Steam. Would be awesome.
Trevor: is there anything stopping you from open sourcing the game parts but keeping the media under a different license? Even the Free Software Foundation seems to support that model.
ReplyDeleteRats, someone just mailed me on the web form, then I realised that form is borked and all mail gets eaten! :( Please send me another message.. :)
ReplyDeleteIt's possible to release it in that fashion. I released an early alpha compiled staticly against SDL and some red lights came up, so I've moved to a dynamic compile and a bit more careful license. I have no problems releasing the source as open and the media as "mixed" if someone can help me on the details...
Why not just join and enhance the Debian Games team?
ReplyDeleteAlso the freedesktop games group is good for cross-distro discussions.
ReplyDeleteTrevor: take a look at the freedesktop games resources page:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Games/Resources
This isn't going to go anywhere. With all the recent video problems in Linux the biggest obstacle is the open-source community and the stupid decisions that they make. I won't leave Windows for Linux because you have games, I want an OS that just works. Windows 7 is coming and you guys should be focusing on improving your shitty desktop experience before worrying about stupid shit like this.
ReplyDeletegood post
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ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, you should first get some artist into the FOSS scene. Because of the IT nature of FOSS, mainly programmer-style people are involved in it, leaving the artists out, because they are simply not interested in it. At first, some kind of "campaign" should be started, to reveal this possibility for the artist, as they do not know about this at the moment. Start at deviantart, or other art-sites, i'm sure there would be some people interested in this kind of "work". There is great, unused "talent capacity", that the FOSS world could use, and both side would benefit from this cooperation. They have what you want, but are not aware of your need.
ReplyDeleteGood luck for the project!
Excellent help! Thank you for this great tutorial!!
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I'd love to see some good FOSS games out there! But I guess I'm not your market, since I already switched to ubuntu 2 years ago. The price was a factor for me :-)
ReplyDeleteAwesome to see the playground is still under construction in Linux. out of curiosity, are all different zerogs 9.4. than direct x plugins zerogs lacks a bit though not particularly care.
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