The Looseleaf Papers

Why didn’t Neal Stephenson’s CLANG game go open source?

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Despite hitting its funding goal of $500,000 last year, development on the game is grinding to a halt, with Stephenson writing on the game’s Kickstarter page that CLANG is now an “evenings and weekends” project because the money has run out, and many developers have sought contract work elsewhere.

—Luke Plunkett, “Famous Kickstarter Turns Into Complete Disaster”, September 19, 2013

https://kotaku.com/famous-kickstarter-campaign-turns-into-complete-disaste-1352054852

I was disappointed by the failure of Neal Stephenson’s historical sword fighting game “CLANG”.

Many people have discussed what went wrong and why, and what we can learn about Kickstarter and crowd-funding in general.

Instead of rehashing this sad ending, I’d like to one aspect not fully explained: why does the CLANG team vacillate about going open source?

In 2012, when the Kickstarter got funded, they seemed unsure.

Q. The video mentions “developing tools for others to use”. Does this mean Open Source, or do you intend to license this technology?

A. Our tools will be free to use for user created content (UGC) for CLANG, much like any other modding/UGC tools. If another company wants to use them for their own games, we will develop a license. We have not yet throught [sic] through all of the implications of making all of our stuff fully open source and so we can’t commit to that one way or the other yet.

Last updated: Sun, Jun 10 2012 3:21 PM CDT

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/244014

In 2013, they start running out of money, and seem to suggest open source as a likely possibility if they couldn’t get venture capital.

We’re going to keep pursuing the commercial funding opportunities. If somehow that fails, and we get to a place where we just cannot hold the team together anymore, then we’re not just going to walk away. We’re going to open source it.”

Stephenson says that the developers don’t want to prematurely throw the doors open and let anyone have at the Clang code, only to have potential funding partners get turned off. “We can’t play that card right away. If we do end up having that conversation, I’m going to try to get any possible investor to see the value of taking that approach.”

—Evan Narcisse, “Neal Stephenson Says His Dream of Making a Video Game Isn’t Dead”, September 27, 2013

https://kotaku.com/neal-stephenson-says-his-dream-of-making-a-video-game-i-1413580120

As of late 2014, the project is called “officially dead”, but they still haven’t released the source code.

The Kickstarter update comment thread includes dozens of additional backers also requesting refunds as well as others asking that the project be made “open source” and available for its supporters to toy with.

—Mike Suszek, “Neal Stephenson’s sword-fighting game Clang officially shelved”, September 19, 2014

http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/19/kickstarted-sword-fighting-game-clang-officially-shelved/

Please release source code and assets under an open license. That would make up for it in my mind and negate the need to consider asking for a refund.

I understand that is not as simple as it sounds and any thing not owned by Subutai Corporation cannot be included but I still think its a fair settlement with backers and may help other developers understand and contribute to the area you have been studying especially if you can provide additional reports into what you did and why.

—RandomTiger, September 22, 2014

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/comments?cursor=7935970#comment-7935969

Hell throw it up on GitHub and offer Pull Requests for those who not only want the source code but for those who might like to keep the project going in their own way through an official outlet.

—Binary Sword Productions, September 23, 2014

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/comments?cursor=7945187#comment-7945186

Neal Stephenson is no stranger to open source, having written an essay in which he extols the virtues of Linux and waxes poetic about the Emacs text editor.

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning…_Was_the_Command_Line

Besides which, he was (is?) a Debian user and even reported a bug in 1997.

From: neal@well.com (Neal Stephenson)
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: ‘can’t load library libX*’
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 13:04:14 -0800

[ … ]

From: Galen Hazelwood <galenh@micron.net>
To: Neal Stephenson <neal@well.com>, 6518@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Re: Bug#6518: ‘can’t load library libX*’
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 22:26:59 -0700

[ … ]

(You wouldn’t happen to be the author of “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age”, would you? If so, I love your work. If not, well, never mind.)

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=6518

So, why isn’t CLANG open source yet?

Allow me to speculate.

First of all, because games feature a lot of artwork – and art isn’t code, legally or otherwise – there tend to be more open-source game engines than actual games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

For example, the Total Annihilation, Doom, Quake, and Marathon engines are now open source, but the assets (i.e. artwork) from the games are not released under a similar license (e.g. Creative Commons).

http://springrts.com/

Due to some certain problems, first with a pair of bugs and then with a non-Free asset, the OpenArena Community Mappack Volume 1 had to be, well, repackaged. The good thing is that this time the 100% of it is still GPLv2-compliant. Server admins who are going to use the pack should delete the old versions of this pack (and if you were using betas, those as well) and use this new version instead.

http://openarena.ws/smfnews.php

To make this package useful, you will need to create and install the non-distributable quake-registered or quake-shareware package, by using the game-data-packager package.

Creating quake-registered requires data files from a Quake installation or CD-ROM.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/quake

Usually, if a company at any point made money off of a game, they don’t ever give the entire thing away for free, for legal, financial, and practical reasons.

There are exceptions, such as Lugaru, in which Wolfire did give away some of the art, so that Debian can package the entire thing without requiring an activation key. (The artwork is still not Creative Commons, however.)

This package contains the data files for OpenLugaru, which is a limited subset of the original art (which has been released for free and/or gratis). It also includes the custom ‘Temple campaign by ‘Slib’ and some of its custom art.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/openlugaru-data

Game art assets are expensive to make, and even if they are licensed under Creative Commons, they can be hard to re-use. Even a CC-Attribution can be costly time-wise when an independent developer is trying to put together a game. This is one reason why more restrictive licenses, such as CC-Non-Commercial, are not the best choice for people who actually want their creative works to be used by other people. [1]

Wolfire was able to release some of their art because Lugaru is an independent game made mostly by one person, so fewer people have to sign off on the legal rights, and Lugaru made most of its money from the Humble Indie Bundle.

Wolfire is currently taking pre-orders for the sequel, Overgrowth, so the developers aren’t beholden to a publisher and don’t need to keep on selling it to make more games. (Although Wolfire is still selling a version of Lugare with improved textures, so its not as if they’ve given up on that revenue stream.)

Game publishers see games as a long-term investment in intellectual property, which they must maintain the rights to at all costs, since old games represent potential future revenue streams.

This isn’t irrational behavior, either; people buy old games for nostalgia or because of the publicity from re-makes and so on. Given the success of e.g. Good Old Games, it’s not surprising that game publishing companies fight hard to keep their games exclusive to them and their distribution platforms, e.g. Electronic Arts’ Origin system, Valve’s Steam, Microsoft’s Xbox Games Store and Xbox Live Arcade, Desura, etc.

This is significant to CLANG because it was going to be released on Steam.

We have just pushed the “Publish” button to submit CLANG to Greenlight on Steam. Enough votes and CLANG will be approved for publishing on Steam, so please log on and vote for CLANG!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/443149

(Gabe Newell was even in the Kickstarter video for CLANG.)

In the video, Newell is seen smithing a crowbar, and Stephenson asks him, “Is that about ready?” to which Mr. Newell replies, “These things – they take time.” Apparently Newell and Stephenson are friends, and Valve’s employees have attended sword training at Stephenson’s Subutai Corporation. According to Newell, who spoke with Kotaku about his appearance, all the smithing equipment is his own and he has a forge in his garage.

—Kyle Hilliard, “Gabe Newell Makes A Surprise Appearance In A Kickstarter Video”, June 10, 2012

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/06/10/gabe-newell-makes-a-surprise-appearance-in-a-kickstarter-video.aspx

Steam has an uncertain relationship with open-source software and games.

While Steam is not hostile to GPL’d games in the same way that e.g. the Apple App Store is hostile to the GPL, [2] Steam still ultimately exists to create a revenue stream for Valve.

There’s only so many games Steam can promote, and it makes more sense to help indie game developers make a living — and get a cut of the profits — than to advertise a game made by a slow, disorganized collective that doesn’t care that much about user experience and polish.

Steam gamers can be unforgiving of poor gameplay even for commercial games with professional support. Consider, for example, the “Ace of Spades” release in 2012:

The final version of the game was released to Steam on 12 December,[16][17] but was met with mixed critical reception with many critics claiming that the (free) beta version was superior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Spades_(video_game)

Yeah i bought Ace Of Spades 2 days ago and it has been crashing every 10 minutes everytime i play the game! Does anyone know how to fix this? its really gettin annoying!

http://steamcommunity.com/app/224540/discussions/0/846940247988949226/

There is the additional problem of whether or not to charge money for open-source games. This is by no means forbidden by the GPL or other open-source licenses, but would probably be an unpopular move.

In addition, the open-source ethos tends to be suspicious of the kind of centralized control and digital rights management that Valve wields. For example, one of the developers of Open Arena had this to say in 2012:

I thought about submitting OA to Greenlight when it started (and before the $100 charity fee requirement), but it would’ve lead to bad implications like selling out, adding DRM, or ditching linux. So I didn’t. Plus, one of my valve fanboy friends advised me not to for the sake of reputation since trainwrecks on greenlight are easy pickings.

—fromhell, “Re: OpenArena on id Tech 4”, December 29, 2012

http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?action=printpage;topic=3627.0

The upshot of all these factors is that many of the likeliest open-source candidates are not in the Steam Store.

Xonotic, for example, just found a Steam Greenlight launch to be too much work.

We’d very much like to bring Xonotic to Steam. However, there are some problems that we might need to solve before that. First of all, the game is not ready for that, as we’re still in beta stage, and the game has tons of bugs and half working features that we first would like to fix, and fully implement before introducing it to larger audiences. [ … ] A rushed release on such a high profile platform could have terrible consequences on our reputation.

http://www.xonotic.org/2013/10/about-xonotic-and-steam/?utm_source=anzwix

An open-source version of CLANG might not ever get off the ground, it could be an embarrassment to its original developers, and it could tarnish the reputation of Steam’s Greenlight program. From the perspective of the CLANG developers, a dead project is better than a living project that fails publically (again).

The bottom line is that CLANG, despite the best intentions of its creators, may never be open source.

Appendix:

Here are some more examples of games/software that could theoretically be in the Steam Store, in the sense that they are cross-platform and relatively mature, and a cursory examination of why they aren’t.

Examples of open-source games that are on Steam.

Addendum 2015-03-08:

… game devs are pretty open when it comes to open source, kinda. We’re it not for fear of patent lawsuits you’d see a lot more source code released. However our careers and livelihoods rely on copyright so you’d probably also see assets under lock and key like all the Doom/Quake releases.

—Forrest Smith (forrestthewoods), March 8, 2015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166266

[1]

I speak as founder and President Emeritus of the Open Source Initiative. The NC option in Creative Commons has always been a bad idea and should be removed.

The reasons it should be removed have nothing to do with any of the deep philosophico/political positions usually argued in the debate, and everything to do with the fact that there is no bright-line legal test for “commercial activity”. This ill-definedness is reflected in community debates about whether commercial means “cash transactions” or “for profit”, and it is the exact reason the Open Source Definition forbids open-source software licenses from having such restrictions.

—Eric S. Raymond, “CC-NC considered harmful”, September 7, 2012

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4559

Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be impossible to sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia and reach communities without internet access because every single editor of Wikipedia would need to give permission for their work to be sold. The project would need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven possible), but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for almost all projects, especially for physical copies.

—admin, “Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0”, August 27, 2012

https://web.archive.org/web/20161120133229/http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/

The use of an -NC license is very rarely justifiable on economic or ideological grounds. It excludes many people, from free content communities to small scale commercial users, while the decision to give away your work for free already eliminates most large scale commercial uses.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/11/16331/0655
[2]
Some people swore to me that just because the free-software General Public License (GPL) clashes with the Apple App Store’s Terms of Service (ToS), didn’t mean that Apple would actually pull down GPLed apps. Well, Apple just did. Rémi Denis-Courmont, a Linux developer and the popular VLC media player, has just announced that Apple had pulled the popular GPLed VLC media player from its App Store.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-store/8046