wahlau's online hut

most of the time we see FOSS as a good thing, because of its F. Free. some insist that F is Free as in Freedom, but not beer. But many just hope that beer will be as free as FOSS :)

while looking at Maemo's growth and development, i come across a new game project announced in the mailing list. It is called DragonFear. It is a RPG game similar to 80's bard's tale... One thing that caught my eyes is the following:

Features that work so far:
Kinetic scrolling selector for user input (adapted from Kagu)
3D map view and navigation using the hardware direction pad
wall collisions

it has the feature of kinetic scrolling. Not that i am amazed by this (lots would, and will follow with the comment "ah, it is like iphone. don't like such comments personally), but i am more interested in the statement "adapted from Kagu". Kagu is a rather new media player created for the maemo platform to be used under n800's OS2007. It is a redo/modified attempt from the UKMP project, which is another nice media player for the same platform. What i am trying to point out here is - in the FOSS you are allowed, perhaps encouraged, to learn and adapt things from others. There is no need for a reverse-engineering when you need something. And credits are given when credit's due. Without someone who spent time on achieving kinetic scrolling, and was willing to share his result, we will not see them in many newer applications today. It is not Apple who owns it, and i believe others would have done similar things before iPhone is there, so it is a nice thing that everyone should be able to use and reuse. I must admit that Apple manage to implement it well on iPhone, and proved to others that such approach helps in creating a better UI and CHI. 

such scenarios will most likely not take place in a closed source environment. It will only happen if some take the time to reverse engineer the whole thing, and then try to sell it with a slight differnt tweak. Worst case would be, when one decided to "own" a software feature as a patent. Then no one else should use it except the rightly ones - those who own the software feature, and those who paid the royalty. I still believe in a open community where everyone shares and help each other to achieve better goals and software. We need to respect the right and copyright, but no way one can just say "the pattern belongs to me" then the whole world is banned from reproducing anything near to it. 

so much blabla on a friday morning. Do share what you see in this posts and start enjoying the F in the FOSS.