Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

The punch line is that Graham Nelson still has not open-sourced Inform 7, but hopes to do so in 2019. So, if you decide to build your work on Inform 7 and Graham gets unexpectedly run over by a tram like Gaudi, you're very likely out of luck; you won't have the legal right to fix problems in the platform, port it to new platforms (such as, as he notes, iOS), or remove whatever spyware his heirs decide to add to "monetize the platform".

So, it's nice to hear that he's making concrete steps forward, but the bottom line is that he's still not open-sourcing it, just continuing to promise to open-source it, as he has been doing for many years.

With that in mind, I think the title of the HN post is misleading; it would be more accurate to entitle it "Not Open-Sourcing Inform 7", and still better to entitle it "Not Yet Open-Sourcing Inform 7."

And that's a shame, because Inform 7 looks like one of the most interesting experiments in programming-language design today, and has been for years. Years that I haven't tried it, because downloading and installing proprietary software is not my idea of a fun pastime.

It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical for all the reasons you've noted. However, I see two things that have changed. Most importantly, he has set of specific month and year. He is also stating a specific license, which I don't recall him doing before. Finally, he did release inform 6 as open source years ago.

So again, you have reason to be skeptical. But there are also reasons to hope.

I agree.

I mean, it's obvious why it's taken so long from the slides. He has built an entire literate C project as well as a CLI test project, both entirely independent of Inform; an intermediate output format; and has worked toward an intermediate input format.

I for one am very interested in his ideas around exporting the world model to other areas, like Unity. That way you can script your world in Inform 7 and then make it available in e.g. a 3D RPG with a bridge between the two. Obviously that's years away, but it's an interesting idea.

Finally, the main concern here is that there's just so much here that has lived in the author's head for decades (18 for Inform 7 alone) that it will be daunting for new contributors to get involved.

None of that is relevant to software licensing, source code secrecy, and the entirely preventable risks they impose on users. Yes, it's possible that without Graham and the commendable efforts he is making to make the source understandable, it would be dauntingly difficult or impossible to understand well enough to make changes. But the users who would hypothetically be up a creek in that situation are even worse off now: they don't have the source code at all, and if they did, they'd be at legal risk if they tried to use it, due to the toxic and corrupt copyright system.

Basically from my point of view he's asking other people to put themselves at risk of having their creative work destroyed, in order to avoid risks to his ego.

"Creative work destroyed" is scaremongering. All the old versions of Inform are available, so people who have already written games can build and release a new version of their game just like they always could.

It will be great to see an open source version and maybe this will result in improvements that attract new authors, but in practice, Inform 7 being a closed-source tool has not been any trouble for existing game authors and the risk is no greater than before.

It is extremely well founded scaremongering. Almost every creative work in a format only accessible via proprietary software becomes unreadable in fifty years or less, an eyeblink in human intellectual history. That risk has always been the same. The few exceptions are things built on proprietary software that was so popular that open-source clones exist — a relevant example in this case being the Z-machine.

Creative work built on proprietary software is like a sand castle below the high-tide line, except that the tide won't try to monetize your castle by bundling malware into it.

A game created in Inform 7 runs on a Z-machine emulator. (Or Glulx, its successor.)

This just isn't a problem. Open source emulators are available. You don't need Inform 7 to run old games from ifarchive.org.

(Often, authors release their games without source, so having Inform 7 wouldn't do you any good anyway.)

That assumes that the only relevant article in the long term is the executable code. But I don't think that's true at all. The Lyons book on Unix, and several books about the Linux kernel, have shown that the source code also matters. If you can't correctly interpret the source code, the source code is far less useful. So if source code is also important (and it is), then having a publicly-known way to process the source is also important.

Thank you for saying this, David. I wanted to say it but I had already lost patience with the discussion. BTW, speaking of the source-code archival problem and also your work on the Karger–Thompson attack, have you been following the work on Mescc?

I've been semi-following the bootstrappable builds stuff in general - that work is already listed on my page https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust Mescc is obviously an example. Years ago Bellard demonstrated a bootstrap using tcc to compile the Linux kernel (which was pretty amazing).

I think the approaches could work together well. Bootstrappable builds reduce the size of the binary you have to trust, and DDC can act as a check on a binary.

Thanks for asking!

Have you ever open sourced a large, complex, closed-source project of a similar scale, developed by one or two people?

I built a project with a friend that was half the size of this one and less complex. At one point we had to decide whether to open source it or shut down the project entirely. The amount of work to get it to the point of open sourcing it so that anyone could meaningfully contribute to it (or even build it without a very specific setup) was daunting, and I simply didn't have the time or energy to go through with it.

The fact that he's spent years getting it ready is a testament to his dedication to the community.

Finally, you have no way of knowing what his contingency plan is. He may have passwords and instructions detailed to transfer control to someone else in the event of his death.

No, I haven't, but that's irrelevant.

The fact that your build setup was poorly documented provided you with no incentive to use the legal monopolies granted by copyright law against your users. I agree that it's important to go beyond the mere legal grant of rights to study, copy, modify, and redistribute software, for example by simplifying and documenting your build system. But not having done that, or not yet having done that, is no excuse for not having done the more basic step of simply granting them the legal rights that the law ought to grant them in the first place, but doesn't; nor for keeping secret the source code to the software your users were depending on, preventing them from modifying it even if they were capable of figuring out how to compile it.

And it's true, I have no idea what his contingency plan is. But you are suggesting some kind of secret Rube-Goldberg-style legal setup as a substitute for the simple and straightforward publication of source and promulgation of a license like the Artistic License he plans to use. That would also be much safer, legally, since there's no room for heirs, debtors, or lawyers contesting a will, auctioning off the copyright to the software in order to pay debts or legal fees, etc. A much more likely case is that he simply doesn't have any plans for that situation because he isn't worried about it, and you've been reading too many silly novels.

Oh wow...I've never gotten around to playing with Inform7, but always meant to and have played a lot of games written in it. Emily Short is a big favorite of mine.

Funny thing is I always assumed it was already open source.

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