OpenNewserv?

Written by slug on Sunday 11 May 2008

Well we've been thinking about this for a long time...

The problem is it would take us a long time to clean up our code for release, assign copyright and replace sections of it due to licensing problems, not to mention the extra ongoing maintenance.

Now this could prove to be useful for us, but being realistic we wouldn't get any contributions back at all; in the past 5 years we've only had one patch from outside .dev for our public projects.

On the other hand we've had people:

hacking our repositories
plagiarising leaked code (in some files a complete copy/paste with names changed), removing the clever hard-to-understand stuff that makes it cool, not to mention our names and copyright, then releasing it (if we ever release Newserv, you'll see what we mean...)
setting up QuakeNet clones, attempting to steal our users and/or their account information

So you can see why we're reluctant to put the effort in, can you convince us at to why we should bother?

legacy

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i think that an openserve will only increase the attempts to hack the network's services and can do other harm as you mentioned, but i can also think that if you'd set up a way for dev teams to work with the service, like external addons to work with it, it'd be the best solution, don't you think?

NaNg said on Thursday 15 May 2008

I doubt access to QuakeNet services will make stealing accounts easier, and releasing services can't cause a challenge to QuakeNets #1 position, can it? ;) From what I know, only closed-source projects were leaked and stolen. Imho you could get contributions back if you cared about them (my personal experience with devcom is the "whatever"-kind of reply). I hope you'll change your bitter attitude towards releasing projects. Devcom does a great job and I'd enjoy taking a look at the result.

thommey said on Saturday 17 May 2008

ult. (btw: the cake^W500-char-limit is a lie!!!)

thommey said on Saturday 17 May 2008

only you can choose the best solution ;)

Nakaori said on Monday 26 May 2008

I would like to say nice post thommey! :P I totally agree with you, I don't have much experience with the devcom team, but they do have a bit of a bitter attitude, but they are doing a great job with our network. :)

TeneseanGuy said on Tuesday 27 May 2008

Re: stealing accounts, people do this using our released code. You call it bitterness, we call it realism and it is based on our past experience; can you blame us for being this way after the treatment we've received from our loving development community (noting the points above)? We realise this is a vicious cycle of course...

slug said on Wednesday 28 May 2008

TeneseanGuy: The "attitude" you see from some of us might actually be directly related to your own behaviour. Anyway, I don't see the point of open-sourcing NewServ - or parts of it. Users can easily report bugs even without having access to the source code. And what contributions could there possibly be other than that? Custom services? Surely wouldn't get loaded. Larger modifications to the base code from untrusted users? Reviewing those (for security reasons) would be a pain.

BlackShroud said on Wednesday 04 June 2008

I think it's a great idea to release the framework. It might actually blow some new life into IRC service developing. Ofcourse everything would need to be properly commented and a good demo module would need to be made. I don't exactly get how releasing newserv would result in possible account stealing but maybe you (read the devs) have more insight into that. IRC needs something new; the old Q source code is generally crap. Ofcourse it's all upto the devs, but I say go for it.

metroid said on Friday 06 June 2008

Ha! Comments!

slug said on Tuesday 01 July 2008

Well, I have no clue where to submit patches. I don't think the dev page says. I did find a couple of bugs in L which I fixed, but since you don't use L anymore... Anyway, I'm just commenting here to say that I'd absolutely love an open sourced N. I don't run an IRC network but I've always been interested in messing around with IRC bots / services etc. I replaced large parts of L with Lua code which was quite fun, would be fun to do this kind of stuff with N too.

Anders1 said on Tuesday 08 July 2008

Turns out I was wrong, there is a forum for submitting patches. Perhaps that is a recent addition...

Anders1 said on Tuesday 08 July 2008

I can't say I quite agree with some of the arguments, especially given that you guys have based some of your work (snircd) on projects released by other networks. I can get wanting to be unique and not wanting other networks to have what you have, but the simple fact is, if a bug in a competing product is fixed, everybody wins, even if they do not use that product, because IRC overall improves as a result.

jhill said on Friday 21 November 2008

Don't let this idea die, I really like the qnet services and it's very interesting to read and learn from the source code :(

anders said on Saturday 06 February 2010

I do have to wonder why this article is tagged as legacy. The topic is and always has been relevant, and is far from being a legacy idea, unless, of course, it has long since been given up on. Furthermore, I believe what you considered the "plagiarized leaked code" has been removed in the meantime and become unavailable.

irony said on Monday 24 June 2013