Hi everybody,
I'm a developer on the YASS project team and strook told me about your project and the ongoing discussion, so maybe I can say some things from my point of view.
I didn't talk to everybody on the YASS team yet, so all I say is just my personal opinion.
First of all, congratulations! The screenshots of VegaStrike I saw so far look very impressive!
YASS started in 2003 when a friend and I actually wanted to write a medieval RPG and we wrote a simple space shooter to get into the matter of computer game programming first. Somehow the space shooter was more interesting than the originally planned RPG though, so we stick to it and it evolved to something more complex.
Until strook joined our team some weeks ago we were only 2 developers and one artist who joined the team a few years ago. We talked about making the project open source, but decided against it at the very beginning.
But back then we were students and we had a lot of spare time at our hands. This has changed now, we have all to work and finding the time to work on the project is not easy. I had a call with strook yesterday in which he suggested to think again about making YASS open source. Well, I have to say: I do not hate it.
In early October we have rented a vacation home for 2 weeks and we will work on the next binary release of YASS. I think that will be a good time to make such a decision.
For me it is not so much about money (although the concept of donations is quite interesting
), but rather about what is best for the project and that there is progress. Of course it is also important for me to keep some control of what is going on, at least in the trunk. There are some legal issues with licenses to solve, but that should be possible.
All things considered I could imagine to release YASS under GPL for instance and seek for some kind of cooperation with you guys on the VegaStrike project. I will talk to the rest of the team and then we'll see.
Cheers,
Ronin