Consider Open Source way?

[ToKsick]

Do you think the open source way to maintain the application, would benefit here?

[ToKsick]

Hey there,

we do keep maintaining the bot, but since we are also pretty busy with RL stuff we are sometimes not able to react immediately.

The bot is not Open Source for 2 reasons:

1) Credit where credit is due - Our developers put in a lot of work and time and we don't want others to claim the whole project as their own.
2) The MF Bot Community is not that big - Instead of having several developers that work on the bot on their own, it'd be way more efficient to come together as a group. That's why we are still looking for willing developers that have time, experience and devotion to help us maintain/develop the bot.

[ToKsick]

Hey,

firstly I want to thank you for your response.
I have some info for you about the points you wrote.

1) You can use open source license, something like GNU Public License and nobody can't copy your project (It is technically possible to copy it but it is license protected..). If somebody will copy your code you could just report an infringement of copyright.

2) I understand but If the code is open everyone can contribute to your project if you accept their changes. Community can solve bugs or add more features that community requests and you might not have time to work on. I don't want to force you to open source it by my reply, but I think that it would benefit to the community because that could have option to add what they want if you accept it and primary to you.

In general.. Your work is awesome and I believe you spent huge amount of time developing it and I am pretty sure that opensourcing your app will hugely increase the community.

Thanks

[F0restbear]

We are glad you are liking it

If somebody will copy your code you could just report an infringement of copyright.

Our time is pretty limited and that's why we'd like to save ourself from that kind of trouble precautiously. Trust me, we had some very weird incidents with some users in the past and I don't believe it will get any better by making the bot Open Source.

In regards to 2): In the end we need to weight the arguments up and I honestly believe there are more reasons not to publish the code opposed to doing it. Anyone that is serious about helping developing the bot is more than welcome to join us.

But maybe you can enlighten me: What do you think are the reasons why the community would be more willing to help develop the bot once it's Open Source opposed to joining the team and become a developer? Because if there are any, this is definitely something we have to fix on our side.

[Oshino]

Software dev here. While I see the points of both sides of this argument, I can just underline those of ToKsick:
I'd really enjoy contributing to this project whenever I encounter an issue or missing feature! The only thing holding me back is the closed-source (and non-git) nature of it.

[F0restbear]

Hi Oshino,

thank you for your input! May I ask, what are the reasons speaking against becoming a MF Bot developer?

[ToKsick]

Thanks for your replies.

I understand your argument about joining your team instead of open sourcing the code. However, there might be people who want to contribute maybe just for once or once per some period of time. Or they find some solution to something you have hard time to solve so they want to help. I think you should welcome those people. Every contribution should be welcome.

These people maybe do not want to join your team because they might see some duties to contribute to your code. If you open the code just for the person who wants to contribute for once, you can find many people that join your team and develop one feature and then will probably leave.. This help might also benefit your project, however always you have to share the code with them and if you share the code with everyone like this, it is better than to open it for everyone. That one person who has the code because he implemented some feature or fixed the bug can also share the code with someone who steals it...

With the open sourcing as I said you increase the amount of community.. With that comes more people who have time to check if there wasn't an infringement of copyright... And they might (I believe) solve that instead and just let you know it is OK..

I want to thank you both for your good arguments

[ToKsick]

I forgot to wrote about the bot languages.. There are some mistakes in the translation of mine language. This could be also solved by open sourcing the code.. There are experienced people who could translate it right ..

Sorry for my bad English...

Have a nice day

[ToKsick]

Hey there,

so I talked to Robin about this again and it seems like it was a missunderstanding on my part. My perception was that we are talking about continuous contributions to the bot and I did not think about the fact that one might not want to join the team to just contribute once.

Apart from the arguments from above, we'd have a few more problems:

1) Mushroom and Ad bots - Our concern is that once our bot code is Open Source, there will be mushroom and ad bots again. While we believe that Playa is condoning our bot as we enable a good part of traffic on their server, we do not think that they will tolerate any kind of harm that that could affect their users (mushroom bots) and especially their income (ad bots)
2) Licencing - As we use a lot of images from Playa, I don't think we are allowed to share them publicly

In regards to the language: We have a dedicated plattform for our translators as VS can be really slow sometimes.


All in all I really appreciate your thoughts and even though Robin is actually a huge Open Source fan, I do believe that it would just create more problems.

[ToKsick]

If it is not possible by the third party software we should leave it as it is and hope that the application will be maintained as long as possible.
I want to thank you for your work about my request and I hope it will be possible to opensource the app sometime in a future.
I will write it again.. You are doing good job.

Keep up a good work and see you.