I've found the design doc itself is relatively useless once it has been created, but that the act of creating the design doc is an indispensable part of the process. Spending time and getting your thoughts organized before diving into the team, the management and the editor makes a huge difference.
In the summer of 2005, flipcode.com closed its doors. During its nearly seven years of operation, the site was a popular resource and community hub based primarily around 3d graphics and game programming. Throughout its history, countless readers participated in community features and contributed many timeless, high-quality technical articles & source code. The vast majority of this content has been kept available publicly, and can be accessed through the updated flipcode archives.
It sounds like this company is firmly founded (a year old, spending money, etc), so asking to become a co-founder at this point isn't fair to founder(s). Seeing as you've also been paid for the work you've done so far this seems like an amazing generous offer. Also think about what a different candidate would accept as CTO, which is what must happen should you decline.
I couldn't disagree more. There was indeed a very dark age due to Microsoft. I often wonder what a world full of scientist and engineers that had the highest quality software available to them would have been like. Instead we got Microsoft's monopolistic and predatory business and consequently we have all suffered. If you perceive Apple as being controlling then you must not have lived through this Dark Age like I did.
I'm confused about your talk of vesting. Founders don't vest, they create the stock and sell/give it to others with a dollar amount or vesting schedule. Are you a founder or an early stage employee?
Any developer has an addressable market to target. I don't think we really care what the OS is (Win,Xbox,PS4,iOS,whatever). If there is a market opportunity, we pounce. There simply has not been a Linux market opportunity that has inspired any real business. Will SteamOS change that? Time will tell....
You own your damn phone. Apple didn't lock you up and force your money out of you. Stop whining about getting what you paid for. I love my iPhone, and the iPhone market, but I understand what I paid for. You have plenty of alternatives.
No. I've used SCUMM, was the core systems engineer on Grim, and founded Telltale. I'm very familiar with both. The spirit of SCUMM is very much alive, but SCUMM is a system, not just a language. Lua runs circles around SCUMM as a language (SCUMM didn't support >8bit numeric types till Monkey3!), but as a game development system SCUMM was really cool. There's much that Unreal, Unity, etc could learn from it, but "running circles around Lua" is (ahem) hyperbole.
Google is still a one trick pony from a revenue perspective. It sells advertising pixels in web browsers. As the world moves to consuming less and less info via web browsers this will become a bigger problem for Google. It seems every day I am getting so much more of my info from mobile/tablet apps than I am from a traditional browser. For instance I use the Yelp app to find businesses instead the browser. Of course I still spend a lot of time in a browser, but I certainly see a future where the browser goes the way of newsprint as my devices get smarter and smarter software. Google doesn't have a revenue model for those devices (yet).
This is my least favorite argument when talking about removing advertising from my life. Facebook and Google will simply do something else. Why is "ad supported" always considered the only business model?