Fedora and Games (Was YUM RFE)

[Hans de Goede]

Karen Pease wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 October 2006 01:16 pm, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>> Jesse, I just don't think it's that simple.
>>
>> It's easy for us to state, as policy, that "if you wander off the path,
>> Fedora will eat your babies."
>>
>> But *a lot* of people still take that risk when they don't understand the
>> risks they're taking.  At all.
> 
> But the obvious issue is: why do people take that risk?  It's simple: much of 
> what people want doesn't come with Fedora.
> 
> Example: Lets look in Amusements/Games.  I have my system set up to have about 
> a half dozen repos in addition to Fedora.  Only perhaps a fifth of the games 
> listed are from Fedora.  Where's Monsterz?  Where's Nazghul?  Where's 
> Crack-attack?  Tong?  Frozen-bubble?  Pingus?  Trackballs?  Liquidwar?  I can 
> keep going.
> 

As a very active Fedora Extras Games SIG member let me cut in here:

First: Crack-attack, Frozen-bubble, Pingus and Trackballs are all in FE
and all at there latest version (I maintain all 4 of them). Also a quick
yum list delivers:
monsterz.i386                            0.7.0-7.fc6   extras-developme
nazghul.i386                             0.5.4-2.fc6   extras-developme
tong.i386                                1.0-7.fc6     extras-developme

Second about the others if they meet the FE license demands, why haven't
you filed an RFE, please add any OSS games you want here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/WishList
and/or here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SIGs/Games

I even take the trouble to talk to upstream to get license conditions
changed if nescesarry, we for example have tremulous in FE because I
managed to find out that the troublesome shaderlab Textures where
relicensed on Debian requests to a suitable license. Unfortunately this
wasn't documented anywhere and Debian still has tremulous in non-free
(but thats because they believe that any of the Creative Commons
licenses is non-free, not only the non commercial ones).

And tremulous is just one example, I have also managed to get worminator
(try it) released under GPL and ported it to Linux (from win32), and so
I could go on and on.

If you like monsters try crystal-stacker, another game for which I
managed to get the license ammended to make it OSS, and then ported to
Linux.

So in short if you want more games:
1) let us know which ones
2) come and join the Games SIG and package a few yourself
3) Ask upstream politely to amend their license, you will be surprised
   how often they will comply when asked politely and you properly
   explain things.

Thanks & Regards,

Hans