When the hell did that happen? The Nethernet liberates their source code.

PMOG Announces that they are going to open their source. They create a page for it, claiming that they are released under the GPL. But things are not as they seem…

Continuing with my reporting of the wacky antics over at The Nethernet (check the previous articles I’ve written on this)  I’ve just now noticed that they’ve apparently and silently liberated their source code under the Affero GPL. This is indeed good news and precisely what I was calling for when I they first declared that they’re shutting down the game 1 year ago.

It seems they had announced that they were going to open their source a few months ago but since I had stopped monitoring their blog since the new relaunch, I missed it. Since April which was their latest update, it appears that there’s been no more information forthcoming and the final release of the source was never properly announced. Put that down to the fact that they seem to have fired their old community manager ((I just noticed that this is quite an old post. It seems that Burdenday is still active in the community on a semi-official role)) and perhaps they have neglected to pick up his duties.

In any case, nobody seems to have picked up on this and doing a quick search online reveals no results. Looking deeper, it seems that the code has not actually been published on GitHub yet, even though the page about being open source currently exists and seemingly links to GitHub repositories. Those repositories do not exist however and it appears that I’m not the only one who has noticed this. I have no idea what is going on to tell you the truth. The forums are almost dead and the main devs of The Nethernet don’t seem to be taking much of an active role in their community (which is a pretty bad idea in the first place).

The only thing I can assume is that they are still preparing the code for an open source publishing but for the life of me, I can’t imagine what’s taking them so long. The original announcement was about 2 months ago and yet there’s been no progress yet. Unfortunately this also means that their community is slowly stagnating as there’s nothing new coming to the game, no events happening, no excitement from the ones who should be the most excited (the devs) etc. The more they wait before completing their move to open source, the more likely that they’ll simply end up releasing it after any and all interest in the game has died. It would be a sad tale indeed.

Anyway, I’m interested to see what, if any, will come out of this. Hopefully they’ll proceed with the code liberation and this very interesting concept for a game can finally be truly expanded through community effort and creativity.

2 thoughts on “When the hell did that happen? The Nethernet liberates their source code.”

  1. Hi, the Community Manager Joe Wagner, burdenday, came back in a volunteer basis. There is one programmer, also volunteering, left. If you follow the twitter accounts of the principals, they have gone elsewhere – I don’t remember where, so ask me.
    I’m dav2 Find me if you will.

    1. So the principals have jumped ship and it’s all left up to one volunteer? Damn! Do you know what’s holding him back from releasing the source?

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