[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002 08:48:09 -0600 (CST) 
Dominic J Eidson <sauron at the-infinite.org> wrote:

> The GPL bigots will promptly bring to your attention that an open
> license (such as the GPL) will prompt you to _fix_ the security
> issues, etc - instead of relying on security through obscurity...

Much of the vaunted security advantages of Open Source comes from
the "many eyeballs" argument.  The problem with that argument is
that it scales non-linearly with the size of the population
using/abusing the product.  With a small user base (in the
developer/useful-eyeball sense) it is easy for the badhats to
effectively outweigh the benefits of the rest purely by percentage
dominance.  Additionally in the case of a custom MUD client where
the server side sources are not also Open Source (and thus with a
supporting community), the incentive for a badhat versus a good hat
is considerably larger, especially if there is the potential for
financial gain (eg the various people running UO/EQ/etc auction
farms on EBay).

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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