Thursday, September 19, 2013

Oregami association on the horizon

It is quite hard to believe, but the first real discussions about the founding of our Oregami association already took place in January 2012, i. e. some 20 months ago. And founded it is not, yet! So what were we up to all this time? And why do we want an association hosting this project at all? A little retrospect shall give these information, furthermore we want to give a little perspective on the future.

MobyGames faces them, TheLegacy faces them [German], thematically different web sites also face them [German] - always the same old problems. Caused by the experiences with other database projects we committed ourselves quite early to one basic principle for Oregami: maximum independence from individuals. First and foremost, this principle should be applied to the legal base of the project, too. The legal manifestations we saw with other game databases (private, half-commercial, commercial) had, in our opinion, one crucial disadvantage: all these projects were legally run by a single person or company, two at the most, which left us with big questions about the future-proofness of their data. What would happen when this single person would lose interest, when this single company would be sold or become insolvent? What future would arise for these projects then?