this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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but older videogames were extremely proprietary... like NES or Sega... So it would be something different.
I don't think stallman would say videogames being proprietary is evil, I believe he made an exception for art.
And bear in mind, every vintage console emulator to play those games are open source.
Somewhere im the bowels of youtube, there's the footage of Stallman quarreling with B. Lunduke on this very question. It was a micro-scandal some 15 yrs. ago, I think.
Now that you mention it I faintly remember that. Been a long time since I watched Lunduke.
This was on the 'Linux Action Show' on Jupiter Broadcasting; Lunduke used to be a very annoying co-host before getting replaced by Matt Hartley.
I was afraid to say it in case you liked him but YES. When I first got into Linux I subscribed to his standalone show on youtube, but he was so god damned long winded, I can't tolerate any of his content now, especially since he got 'weird'
Noticable shift in his content for me to me too.
Here it is, straight from the horse's mouth
Oh, damn. Thanks for finding that man. Now I'm not sure where I read his stance on closed-source art. I might be mixing that up with Torvalds stance in tivoization,, but I'm not sure. It might've been the Lunduke interview Wzstolzing mentioned.
No he does actually mention in the middle of that that while code must be free, art is different because art is not software. I guess he's imagining a situation where a game would have multiple licences (one licence for the code, a different one for the art assets).
Very few games would qualify for that, unfortunately. One of the few that comes to mind would be when iD released the source code to Doom 1, 2, and 3 under GPL, but with the assets still under copyright.
I would be surprised if someone who games stuck entirely to open source options. Even so there are some pretty good entries out there like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. It's pretty amazing and better than any top down SNES game I've ever seen.
video games started LONG before NES or Sega …
The oldest crpg I ever played was called advent, because the Vax computers could only use 6 characters for file names and so the people who ported it couldn’t use the actual name “adventure.” It was basically the same as the game infocom shipped as Zork.
Apparently the original implementation was on the PDP-10 in 1976. There might have been a couple other games that predated it by a year or two, but adventure was the big one in my opinion because it led (eventually) to the creation of the infocom text based game engine and a whole line of games ranging from hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy to leather goddesses of Phobos.
I have never owned a console, but have been playing games since I was 4 (that would be 1981). Also I can't remember paying for anything in those days :-) Everything came on cassettes and floppies.
I made some very basic text based games back then. Nothing that anyone else would ever play :-)
(Also I am a developer, but not in the FOSS sphere)