UpliftedOctopi wrote:

I will begin this thread with a tentative inquiry to not only the developers, but also anyone with access to pertinent information. The first question that it seems should be answered is: "Does Posthuman Studios feel that Eclipse Phase has been a success so far?" Additionally, it would seem important to gain an idea of the public's response to the same question. In consideration of this, I encourage everyone to feel that their contribution to this topic is relevant. My hypothesis is that the Creative Commons License has achieved an instance in which both the public and the business feel that the product is a success through Eclipse Phase. The implication here, that I intend to emphasize, is that products, available for no cost, can be successful in a competitive environment. Any critique is welcome but, in interest of not exceeding my lucidity rating with trauma, please make all effort to ensure it remains cordial.

To a certain degree, we've known that free and open source products are capable of pulling in incomes for a long time. Many of the largest players in the world support and even exclusively produce open source or free products; Google (of which, most of their software is either free to use or open source), IBM (which created the IBM PC architecture and released it as open source, revolutionizing the way that we produce computers), Red Hat (whose primary product is a free operating system, and they are still on the S&P 500) and the Mozilla Foundation (a non-profit organization that pulled in 98 million in profits in 2008) are just the first four that come to mind. It's a business model that works, and will only get more prominence as more companies show how feasible it can be. I think the biggest problem with adapting these technologies are the consumers themselves. It's only the last two generations that has grabbed hold of it to a large degree, and ironically I think it's also these last two generations that forcibly propelling its prominence. Even where free products do not exist, younger people see fit to convert pay-for products into free products by way of digital piracy. Some think this as a simplistic crime, but in reality it seems more like forced conversion into a new economy; download a pirated game or album sometime, and you'll notice that a common trend is to have a "if you like it, please purchase it" disclaimer in a readme file. This is because digital pirates aren't the shoplifters and baseless thieves that companies try to pain them as; they are people like you and I who see a new model for economy, and want to push it along as quickly as they can. And this has expanded somewhat beyond the software industry, obviously. Not just Eclipse Phase, however... Trent Reznor has been producing and making Creative Commons albums since 2008 (though he technically started in 2007, when anger from how his record label was handling the album Year Zero made him release it for free and demand that people steal it). Plenty of authors are appearing that release books for free. The infancy of fabrication technology has spurned a generation of people producing 3D blueprints for products... for free. The open source movement threatens to spread like wildfire across all boundaries, and the only thing seemingly holding it back is the continued scarcity of materials.

UpliftedOctopi wrote:

"Does Posthuman Studios feel that Eclipse Phase has been a success so far?"

Absolutely. Our first print run sold through very quickly for a new game, and our PDF sales were higher than we anticipated (though the low PDF price point may have also contributed to this). The CC license means that the game found its way into the hands of thousands of people who wouldn't have seen it otherwise (or may not have seen it as quickly). It has also earned us an incredible amount of good will from our fan base, and that's an excellent thing to have. We've seen a good amount of fan projects start up right away as people take advantage of the license to hack together their own spreadsheets, characters sheets, ports to other rules systems, translations to other languages, and so on. We've also gotten quite a bit of attention online simply for the approach we've taken. Overall, I'd say we've adequately cleared that initial hurdle that new games face of simply being known and picking up a dedicated fan base.

UpliftedOctopi wrote:

My hypothesis is that the Creative Commons License has achieved an instance in which both the public and the business feel that the product is a success through Eclipse Phase. The implication here, that I intend to emphasize, is that products, available for no cost, can be successful in a competitive environment.

I would say that is true and I think there's a growing body of evidence supporting the idea that giving away your product digitally increases print sales, and serves in effect as a grassroots marketing method as people who like it pass it on to their friends. I would hesitate to say that this is going to be true for all things given away for free. I still feel that quality is a big issue. I don't think EP would have been as widely accepted if we'd had a poor graphic presentation, or hadn't put as much effort into the setting, or things like that. This is a criticism that gets leveled at Cory Doctorow and his CC evangelism too -- that his method of putting books out for free online works for him because he is a good writer and somewhat famous already, and that it doesn't work as well for new authors who are completely unknown. While I do think this approach is going to be of some benefit to just about everyone trying it, I think actual *success* is still going to be determined by other quality factors.

PaulK wrote:

Actually, IBM did not release the PC architecture as you say. The original PC BIOS (which was the core of the architecture) was meticulously reverse-engineered by a team at Compaq who created a detailed specification of the architecture. A second team used the specification to create their own BIOS that was 100% identical in operation to that of the IBM PC. Take a look at http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html for a (slightly) more detailed description. /Paul

Partly correct. IBM [i]did[/i] in fact release the architecture, they just didn't release the BIOS. The idea was that they weren't going to force people to get licenses to create peripheral hardware and components, but they still wanted to drum up sales for their computer line specifically, to which all devices designed for the architecture would exclusively work. Even today, that is a standard that many commercial open source projects strive toward. I would rather every company held one secret close to vest and released everything else open source, than not open source anything at all.