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dragonlordged:
I have a question for the regulars who contribute code here. I came to your site through Wikipedia, which calls Darwinbots an Open Source Alife sim. I've done a bit of digging and found a file called ReadMe- Copyright notice.txt in the SVN repo for the code. I'm concerned that the restriction of use (part 3) doesn't fit the requirements of 'Open Source' that I've been taught. I'm looking around for an Open Source project to contribute to as part of a college project and would really like to help out with Darwinbots, but I'm not sure my professor will accept the project. Does anyone have any ideas to help me?

dlg

Numsgil:
It's open source in that the source is open to view and edit, but no, it's not really Free Software in that sense...

Darwinbots3 (still being worked on) is MIT licensed, though, so if you'd like to contribute and want an Open Source license, that'd be the way to go   The downside is that there really isn't enough of Darwinbots3 put together yet for screen shots, so it wouldn't necessarily make for a compelling presentation if that's the end goal.  Right now it just passes (most of) the unit tests written for it.

Darwinbots3 is organized like a commercial product (in that it has any organization at all ), so it would be a good experience if you haven't played with largish (tens of thousands of lines of code) projects.  And I'm always around and am more than willing to bend over backwards getting you (or anyone) up to speed if you want to contribute.

What sort of emphasis is your project?  Like is the goal more web based technologies or application programming?  I'm guessing it's application programming.  Do you have a particular area in mind as far as graphics, physics, math, GUI, etc.?  Also, DB3 is in C#/.NET, for what that's worth.

If you let me know what sort of class it's for I can probably think of a nice self-contained pass/fail sort of task that would make for a good presentation (assuming a presentation is required...).  I used some of Darwinbots2 for an algorithms class and it went over rather well.  Especially if you're math savvy, I have a cool project in mind involving splines that I don't have a ready baked solution for, so it would have a good bit of research/original research and implementation going on, and at the end you'd have a nice "this is the brute force solution" vs. "this is my solution; see how it's faster?" presentation.

Shasta:

--- Quote from: dragonlordged ---I have a question for the regulars who contribute code here. I came to your site through Wikipedia, which calls Darwinbots an Open Source Alife sim. I've done a bit of digging and found a file called ReadMe- Copyright notice.txt in the SVN repo for the code. I'm concerned that the restriction of use (part 3) doesn't fit the requirements of 'Open Source' that I've been taught. I'm looking around for an Open Source project to contribute to as part of a college project and would really like to help out with Darwinbots, but I'm not sure my professor will accept the project. Does anyone have any ideas to help me?

dlg
--- End quote ---
Well, DB3 is under the MIT license, it doesn't get a whole lot more open source than that. And looking at the (incredibly old) license in the DB2 repro I don't see how:

--- Code: ---(3) Without the agreement of the author redistribution of this product is only allowed
in non commercial terms and non profit distributions.
--- End code ---
is actually a problem.

ikke:
From the non technical standpoint I'd not imagine problems. Propose and see if he takes offense. If he does there is a real problem. Maybe not a big one, so ask why the current way of working of DB is unacceptable to him. Ask to judge on what is is rather than on what it is not.

Moonfisher:
I haven't seen the source for DB3, but from everything I've heard I think it would be the best project to work on. It may not have a lot of fancy screenshots, but it has proper unit testing and structure. Also since I think people are working more actively on DB3 there will be more guidelines and support.
I don't think the source for DB2.43 is a great example to follow, theres a lot of legacy and spagetti code in there.
So I would recommend DB3, although I haven't looked at the source myself
And I'd immagine it would still be possible to use screens from DB2 for a presentation, just to show what the end goal of the project is by refering to the previous version.
Also it sounds like the licence shouldn't be a problem if it's for a college project, but it might be that final projects have to be submitted to a publisher. Some universities publish their own papers, but others use a publisher which then requires a fee from anyone wishing to read the paper. (Something I'm firmly against, but what are you gonna do...)

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