Erlend Sogge Heggen

Thank you for that excellent feedback Matt. I added the FreeGamer blog as per popular demand as well as a self-correction, as I would have added it if only it had sprung to mind prior to publishing.

I think games being ignored as perfectly viable open source software <em>is</em> true. You're spot on about the GDnet culture, which I think is a big part of the problem; open source should be applied as a strength, not as a consequence of being a hobbyist team short of options.

In the game project that greatly inspired this article (ours was a 'Oblivion-but-smarter'), we nailed the open source idea pretty well, but we failed to execute on it. Being the team leader, that was my fault. I was obsessed with acquiring team members who were as serious as the rest of us, able to make the commitment necessary for a consistent design throughout every component of the game. A considerably smaller scope would have eliminated this problem, and it would have opened us up to drop-in contributions effectively expanding it on the merit of the core idea and team behind it.

Open source doesn't change the way we should scope our projects; we'll still need a team of 100++ developers to complete a product that is consistent throughout. There's a misconception among many people that if you slap the open source label on your project the open source enthusiasts will start doing all the work like the busy principle-guided bees that we are. The difference is that a solid 3-man game can become a whole lot better and even bigger by going open source, but it needed those three guys who worked so unusually well together in order to become something in the first place. And they in turn, no matter how talented, could never create WoW-but-bigger.

Hmm, if that made any sense, a "Radakan - Post mortem" might make a pretty good read, he he.

More transparency in the medical sector would be <em>great</em>, but as with most pro vs con discussions, the golden mean is ignored as a perfectly viable compromise.

If physicians know their patients are going to read their notes, they will write differently, and in a worst case scenario they will self-censor themselves to the point that valuable information is lost. As for the patients, I can imagine some ridiculous lawsuits if they all got to read a patient log where the physician is truly honest and outspoken.

Why can't it be an option to separate the log in two? It might even make the records more readable as a whole. Imagine keeping these logs:
- 'Patient Status' as a transparent journal shared between physician and patient, which covers all the hard facts like patient history, test results, medical diagnosis and results of treatment thus far.
- 'Patient Process' as a private log on the patient's psyche, patterns under surveillance, unproven hypotheses and so forth.

What the 'Patient Process' might benefit from would be greater internal transparency. By that I mean, to mitigate bias, the log would be read by practically any medical worker involved in the case, such as the nurses, the test machine operators and so forth.