This isn't in the came persey for for the game. I'm all about opensource (thats how I found the game on freshmeat.net) And I absolutly love it. I just don't have the money to pay for a monthly subscription and my free trial is about to run out. I'd like to see if some kind of method were developed for users to earn credit toward more free time in the game. Either by doing something in the game to help, technical donation of time, etc, etc. I would hate to have o stop playing this because of a time/money issue, it's such a great game that shouldn't be limited to just paying customers and and an 8 hours free trial. The game is easy to learn, fun to play and adiciting and like I said I just can't see people stoping play at the end of 8 hrs (I know there are alot of others who do pay)

- Chris (raven-sorrow)

Thats a good idea, maybe could help the devs and get VO better faster.

Ever tried to herd cats?

Aside from discussing Cathedrals and Bazaars, let's look at this realistically. The devs need money for server fees much more than they need code contributions. Plus they have plans to possibly license the WGAF engine to interested parties. Plus they wrote their own abstraction layers that would take a long time for anyone new to learn. This is not an open source situation. I'd be interested to learn of any working opensource MMORPG. Planescape is useless, about 1fps no matter what you set it to, and it's rather boring. Parsec is dead. Etc. There's a lot of work in an MMORPG- secure, reliable network code, anti-cheating measures, it goes on and on. Well, the devs put it best. Here's a quote:

" We are a very open-source oriented group of people, several of us having contributed to a variety of projects, including the Linux kernel. However, because our business model includes the possibility of selling our game engine to other developers, we don't intend to open-source the game in the short term. We may consider opening up portions of the game at some point, allowing more community involvement and the like, but not in the immediate future. "

And if $10 is too much, you probably shouldn't be playing any online game. Not only is $10/month less than any other MMORPG I know of, it's less than dialup modem costs.

While it is ultimately a good idea to create open source projects for VO's media assets, drivers, and the like [1], and raven-sorrow's intentions are undoubtedly noble, I am skeptical a work-for-credit scheme can be implemented as a general policy.

If you are a professional composer, you might win a month in exchange for some new musical scores :-)

[1] This is a little offtopic, but I might as well say it. There are three bits of VO that seem (to me) amenable to building open-source projects around them. They seem easily separable from the core technologies of VO and would not impact Guild's IP capital. First, the audio and video drivers. Second, certain artwork such as ship skins. Third, text assets such as what appears in mission descriptions (for localization projects and richer descriptions).

It would appear that anyone could use different versions of these without interfering with other players' experience in game. And as improvements bubble up from such projects, Guild could simply incorporate them.