The blog was struck by an attack of script kiddies yesterday evening. Plugins are now disabled – so no side bars – until I finally rectify this invasion and finish my cleanup of the server (probably a few weeks if my home connection doesn’t pick up – I hate 56k!).

In other news; an announcement by Lex Luthor (the previously unknown secret Admin of Solar Empire) has seen the more recent (and still highly insecure) version of SE Generic be licensed under a Creative Commons license. The high drama of Solar Empire never ceases to amaze.

The response to this move was predictably negative. In what appears to be normal behaviour, djcapelis’ negativity resulted in a awe inspiring charge that most of the SE Community (we’re a small bunch) does not respect SE’s open source nature. Hmm, I could easily be misquoting here – so:

You still don’t have to release you code but thats what most people want anyway. Seeing how is MOST of the people in this community have no respect for open source. This will protect Mjac’s code from anyone making their addons public.

Anyways, recent events have been resulting in some eyebrow raising. In the last few months, Lex Luthor has been placed as an Admin in the SE Generic project. The Generic codebase has seen renewed development by Mjac. Moriarty has returned from Limbo and noted that he has been removed (without announcement, warning, or even a friendly email) as an Admin. Now the newer SE versions have entered CC territory.

This could all just be innocent actions, but I’m a supremely paranoid person fresh out of a series of a nonsense emails challenging me over licensing by an LOGD developer. I’m allowed a little paranoid theorising.

In theory, if someone wanted to gain control over Solar Empire (a public domain codebase and predominantly loose affiliation of developers) they would require a number of assets.

1) Control over the solarempire.com domain
2) Control over the forums
3) Control over the primary project
4) Restriction of access by other SE projects to the source code
5) The stamp of “official”
6) As little publicity as possible

My god, they’ve managed all 6! :-)

Its not likely, probably not even intended, but Mjac and Lex Luthor could conceivably boot everyone out of Dodge without much effective resistance. They have all 6 factors in their favour.

Still hypothesising as an extremely paranoid (possibly delusional) person. Such an action might not work as cleanly as suspected. SE has severe limits in gaining acceptablility as a game you should host. It’s extremely insecure, may still (have not tested) be server intensive, and currently lack any large following of players (well, the closed source server do okay).

The forums are largely a collection point for the misfit SE developers (like me) to gather, ridicule, boast and generally keep in touch. We are an extremely mobile community who have mastered the art of switching forums and domains at a moment’s notice.

The domain would be a loss, but since there’s currently no concerted effort to develop an SE community (there being no stable open source variant) its not the end of the world. Alternate domain do exist, and not all are controlled by invisible malevolent forces named after a comic book villain…

Any move to control SE is therefore doomed to failure. Safe and secure in this knowledge, I shall now take those shiny blue pills and banish my paranoia. Ahh…;-)

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