How are you going to prevent developers from introducing malicious code into the game? We like to call this security through visibility. With free software any user of the software, community developer or otherwise interested party may review and submit patches. In a proprietary software environment the only people who can find and resolve flaws proactively are the few individuals employed by the company and that assumes they have time or are assigned to do this. What free software does bring is a multitude more people to criticize changes to the code and review potential flaws. Even closed-source software, operating under the guise of security through obscurity cannot promise that malicious developers will not find and exploit flaws. This is a difficult question to answer because it is akin to asking how to you prevent a thief from stealing your car or a vandal from spray-painting your house. How do you prevent malicious developers from finding and exploiting flaws? As with many other open-source projects people are free to submit patches that resolve these threats themselves. In the long run this move will help greatly improve the quality of the Ryzom code as well as eliminate security issues due to the fact that a much larger number of individuals will be reviewing the code, changes to the code and will have the ability to alert the Ryzom development community of potential threats. Ryzom doesn't take the security concerns lightly and have made preparations to ensure the quality of the Ryzom game remains high and that any security issues that do arise have limited impact on the game and can be quickly addressed. Security Will there be security issues because of the source code being available? By having a larger community base there will be more individuals scratching an itch, to turn a phrase, the community and Ryzom game players will begin seeing features and functionality that a traditional game company may not have the time or desire to implement such as native GNU/Linux or Mac OS X support. By having more eyes on the source code and being more transparent in the development process there will be fewer bugs and security flaws. How will "free software" benefit Ryzom?īy releasing the entire Ryzom platform and encouraging the adoption of the platform by other projects and fostering a healthy community we expect to see the stability and features of Ryzom increase and grow as time moves on. Ryzom is making a bold move in releasing all of its source code (client, server, tools) and all of its media assets. And some have yet to follow through at all. Most of these games have only release their clients as free software and not their servers or tools. Ryzom is one of, if not the first active commercial games to be fully free software. What makes this different or in any way notable? Some game companies are releasing some source code of their software components. Ryzom source code qualifies as both "open source" and "free software" but the Ryzom development community prefers the phrase Free Software. There is the Open Source Definition published by the Open Source Institute. There is another widely used word called "open source" which stands for the Open Source movement and it differs a little from the Free Software Movement.
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