Open up!

A few weeks ago a founder of retrocollect.com asked for access to our internal discussion board, where we develop a brand new game database called "oregami" ("Open register of Game Information"). My first reaction was like "uh, do you want to steal some of our nice ideas?". The answer went something like: "Hey, you claim that you are building a truly open system - doesn't seem to be *that* open."

Ouch. Good shot. He was right. How can we claim to build a new "open game database everybody can help to develop" when we restrict access to our ideas, discussions, drawings, source code and everything else?

So what do we do now?

1. We are preparing the opening of our discussion board and our wiki for the rest of the world. Mostly interesting for German speaking people, as our existing discussions are in German language, but we will offer a board for requests in English language as well.
2. Up to now our source code is placed on a privately hosted Subversion server. This is obviously only a temporary solution. In the last months I read a lot of howtos etc about GIT, which seems to have many advantages in comparison to CVS and Subversion. As I am not yet used to GIT as an active SVN/CVS user, I am keen on some practical experiences with GIT. But I am sure it will work out. Also nice to see that GIT-hosters seem to offer some SVN-import mechanisms!
3. Before we can finally open up everything we want to be prepared as good as possible: once we are open and people start looking at our project, the first impression is very important (if you don't like something it is unlikely that you will stay or come back). We do not want to gamble away this chance.
   In detail this means that we want to:
   1. work out a better, multi-language website
   2. better document our source code and write some how-to's so new developers can easily get in
   3. prepare our source code for the chosen open source license

As you can see, we are totally serious about all this. It would be very easy to just open up our discussion board and source code without further preparation, but this fast solution would not be the best we can do. We want to do it better - better than any project has done before.