Re: LibreJam - FSF* should host a Libre Game development tournament!

[Paul Sutton]

On 07/01/2022 04:21, Richard Stallman wrote:
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>
> It sounds like game jams have value for education in programming, but
> do they have value for the free software movement, enough for free
> software activists to dedicate time to them for the sake of that?
>
> Can the people who want to do a game jam for free software think up a way
> to make it educate about free software as well as about programming?
>
> I don't have answers for those questions, but I think they are the
> crucial questions to pose.

I would guess just using free software to make the games is a start, 
we can then have discussions about software licensing generally but 
include the four freedoms within that discussion.

Also have discussions as to what happens if we need a component that is 
non free,  how doing that ends up tying us in to a situation where if 
that component changes,  our game may no longer compile or work 
properly.  So this gives a practical example of the problems people 
face.  How do we work round that,  make games that interact with say the 
free software drivers/firmware, so we may sacrifice some game features 
but we can enhance other features.

How can we write games to make money if they are written under a free 
software license could be a question we get.?

Another example could be that software is available on wider hardware 
due to the source code being available, and the fact we have the freedom 
to port (which probably requires modification before recompiling) 
Raspberry Pi is available to lots of people, so while some parts may be 
non free,  lets get people in that way too, work around the issues and 
campaign - support truly free hardware - which brings me on to:-

Also with the rise of RiscV and other open processors ( I am not very 
good with the vocabulary here, sorry) isn't there a chance we may 
actually get some truly RYF hardware?  We are going to need developers 
for that at some point,  Core/Libreboot will probably form oart of any 
systems using those CPUs so again those projects need developers.

What about games for pinephones, pine tablets and the pinebooks, it 
seems there are several operating systems and programs are not ported to 
all of them, example the Mastodon apps.

If we want to build a game for free software systems, how can we target 
as many systems as possible easily?

So writing games,  will teach people skills they can use elsewhere too.

Lets do more brainstorming on this.

Paul

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Paul Sutton, Cert Cont Sci (Open)
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