Ideas for the MOTU Games team

[Scott J. Henson]

mikecorn wrote:
> <<
> ... Not just the open source project that pretty-much-works on the
> developer's system
> ... modifying their distributions to a breaking point while they try to
> get a game working
> ... make their packages 100% usable on a generic Ubuntu installation
>>>
> 
> The real problem here is Linux: lack of standards and extensive
> customizations within the many distributions make it difficult to
> package and support software applications that install easily and just
> work (as with Windows). Doing something for Ubuntu would not address the
> real problem, but perhaps, if it gets some critical mass, it could set
> some standards that other distros could follow (?). Good luck.
> 
<snip>

I think this is a bit of a red herring.  Look at what Adobe
recently did with Flash9.  They looked at the available
libraries and settled on a subset that they liked.  If a
game company were to say that their game required a certain
set of libraries they could either provide them on the cd or
hardlink them into the executable.  If they didn't I'm sure
the community would find an easy way of providing the
necessary libraries if the game was worth running to a
sufficient number of people.  Having multiple versions of a
library installed is a problem that has been solved.

There are many companies distributing binary-only apps on
Linux.  This "problem" is well known and well solved.

-- 
Scott Henson
LCSEE Systems Staff
WVU MAE Undergraduate
Ubuntu User
http://sjhserv.net/