Position statement for Ben Longbons

I wasn't planning on running for a board position this soon, but I've been encouraged to try anyway. I have to say, SPI is pretty nice for a community of - . I have observed all the board meetings since March (which I suppose is more than some current board members ... but then, I did have something I urgently needed at the time).

I think games matter (even though they're downtime), and here's why: because people will play games. We've seen plenty of stories lately of proprietary servers shutting down, influential apps being pulled from the appstore ... every time, this kind of news makes me both laugh (because I don't have to put up with that, ever) and cry (because people don't know that there's a better way). The fact that there are proprietary games being ported to Linux is a blow to Microsoft, but not a boon to us.

My observation of the open-source game-writing community is that most people want to write something from scratch ... but the strength of open-source is in sharing. A related observation is that there is a lot of effort into writing new game code, but for content there is only ever a half-hearted demo.

I don't have a plan, but I think that this is an area that is worth making a plan sometime. I observed one attempt at organization between games fall apart because they allowed permissive licenses, and that strongly discouraged code sharing.

-Ben Longbons
Liaison for The Mana World