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Comment by ycmbntrthrwaway | Hacker News Reader

Development of Nethack was somewhat closed until recently.

The public git repository was created this year I think and it is announced in red on http://www.nethack.org/ with two links to http://www.nethack.org/common/git.html

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FOSS existed long before github and git. Even today, there are still open source projects which self-host and aren't using git (eg: OpenBSD).

I suspect Nethack transitionied to git a year ago (from svn or possibly directly from CSV).

"The license was written in 1989 by Mike Stephenson, who patterned it after the GNU bison license."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack#NetHack_General_Public...

Is got some sort of (derogatory?) term for git, or is this just your autocorrect consistently causing problems?

It was autocorrect sorry. Fixed now.

Luckily, "git" is already a derogatory term, so any misspelling would just make it less derogatory.

Nethack source code was not closed and license was FOSS. Developers even accepted patches by email and from rec.games.roguelike newsgroup, but development was highly centralized as only a small group of developers had access to commit history. You could always fork NetHack, like UnNetHack developers did, but you only had access to release tarballs and had to rebase against many changes at once. Maintaining unofficial patch series was not actively supported. That is what I call "closed development process".

Another project with similar policy is OMNeT++ [0]. Simulation models are developed openly in the public [1], but the development of the kernel is done by closed group. Well, they also have restrictive license, forbidding commercial use, but what I am talking about is development model.

If you look at UnNetHack repository [2], it is forked from unofficial "Vanilla NetHack" repository [3] that contains only 53 commits, one for each released tarball. Now, with access to official git repository, it will be possible to track the changes between releases.

[0] https://omnetpp.org/

[1] https://inet.omnetpp.org/Repository.html

[2] https://github.com/UnNetHack/UnNetHack/commits/master

[3] https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack

esr's The Catedral and the Bazaar about centralised vs. decentralised FLOSS development was written nearly 20 years ago, and talked about development of Emacs etc and Linux kernel.

I think it's funny how kids these days think it's too hard to access the source code of a project of it's not on GitHub. Self hosting used to be how it was done. Open source software has been popular at least since the 80s. GitHub is just a baby really.

Services like github lower the barrier of entry to the OS development, and make things a lot easier. I think they provide a lot of value. Of course things were also possible without github earlier, but I think the barrier to open source development was higher.

GitHub is great but the barriers were never that high. It's like the difference between getting up to change the channel and using the remote. Once you've had the remote you feel like you cannot change the channel with out it.

You can also change more channels per second without moving your laptop and chips.

that's not really got anything to do with how nethack development was 'closed'. Previously, while nethack releases were available under an open-source license, there were only a small number of developers which did not discuss nor release in-progress development publically.

Why are they obligated to? The software is still open source. Fork it if you want to.

They're clearly not obligated to do anything. And there were many forks, especially when the dev team went silent for about 12 years, and were basically presumed dead by some.

What's also funny is how adults these days can so easily misconstrue a point, then blame imagined generational differences for their own failure.

Already forgot about sourceforge?

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