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MindX - Mission: Open Source

About MindX
When discovering GNU/Linux in May 1999, I was fascinated by the thousands of programs and tools which were distributed for free. Of course I did instantly know that I wanted to become part of this movement. Some months later I started games development, and my first trial was to use the KDE desktop for a VoxelSpace game called "Fly High". Unfortunately this was inacceptable slow, and I started a second project. "Nautix" should become my main task for almost 10 months - this is the largest time I've ever spent on a single game, even more as on my old QBasic "Tradings" which lasted from September 1996 to June 1997. Because I had already some other games in mind (e.g. the "Noomed!" shooter), I founded MindX as kind of a top project. It has since then changed to a completely open project which supports other developers to create games based on free sources.

Why abandoning these cool commercial games?
All kind of proprietary software is evil. You cannot say you use Linux because of its stability and reliability when in the meantime a closed-source binary, whatever game this might be, is transmitting information about your system over the internet, or is causing system instabilities which you cannot fix. It's not only a question of security: As long as you support commercial game vendors, you do not help the OSS projects to become stronger, and therefore their ability to develop cool games will stay on a very low level. The beginning is always hard, but this step has to be taken. Personally, my last proprietary game was an AoE2 demo in February 2000. Since this date (I've killed Windows those days) no such game will ever have entered my hard disk again.

How can I support MindX?
By supporting MindX you support all, or at least one of, the projects which are listed on the MindX homepage as development or supported games. Of course you can contact their developers directly, but I recommend using a central place like MindX because the coordination and the project cooperation can then be better handled. Just mail me, or any developer of a game which is not proprietary, and explain which task you want to take. You will most certainly have lots of credits if doing a good job. Please, help out the projects if you can!

How can MindX support me?
Whenever you need help or pure working time, send me a mail. I don't have time either, but sometimes there are big gaps (even weekend-big gaps) I can use for such tasks.

Josef Spillner, December 2000
dr_maux@users.sourceforge.net
The MindX Open Source Project