Hammer of Code

Phew, what a day. After yesterday’s git fiasco I really kicked off hard today on coding a few days early. The majority of the work I did today was creating a tonne of shell classes. I didn’t intend on being this productive today; I had taken a little break from Minisec and was looking over the RFTS ruleset when I realize how compartmentalized my mentors work was. It was easy for me to adapt many of Tyler’s (xdotx) classes to fit in well with Risk. Now I couldn’t implement all the logic for the game (I would hope not, if I could I don’t know why I would be here :P) but I was able to “shellify” many of the classes from Tyler’s ruleset that were fairly specific. In particular I cut out all references to “Resources” as Risk knows/cares not about them.



This whole process raised many questions for me about Open-Source in general. In general I wondered, “Is this what Open-Source means?” Now I’m not talking about all the broader implications, but what it means for a developer. Is Open-Source letting others benefit from your past work to make their own work easier? Certainly I’ll be saving weeks if not months of work by not reinventing the wheel, but is that fair? My natural response is to point back at the GPL and say “it says I’m free to use and modify code so long as my resulting code is open as well.” Am I seeing the implications of Open-Source or am I just cheating? (I certainly hope it isn’t cheating, because then I have to go back and redo work.) That said if what I am beginning to experience IS what OSS is all about then I can definitely say I want in. I’ll probably speak some more about all of this once I’m nearer to my projects conclusion.



Off to another topic now, I wanted to make a pseudo-announcement about tpserver-cpp. llnz and I spent a little while last night working out the kinks of my OSX compile issues and they are now formerly resolved. That means a) I can compile and run tpserver-cpp on OSX easily, and b) the next forthcoming release of tpserver-cpp will provide much greater OSX support (for those not running tpserver-cpp on the bleeding edge.) If anyone out there is having problems with compiling/running tpserver-cpp on OSX please let me know and I will see what I can do to help.