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Awww man, the Foley thread got locked!

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Namco:
Perhaps David should release his Pinball Wizard product and not take any steps to pursue any licensing agreements or establish any trademarks and wring his hands all day in the hopes that the product lies enough in a nebulous gray area so that he doesn't get sued and no competitors emerge. The money he saves will certainly pay for the antacids he'll need, and when he gets put out of business by a knockoff product, he'll be a hobbyist like the rest of us!  :cheers:

ark_ader:
Before this thread gets locked, I would like to ask David what his plans are for Virtual Pinball.

Is this venture about to exclude the community who built VP and PinMame and go strictly commercial, or will development and avilable binaries still be open to registered users?

davidrfoley:
I'm assuming you mean Visual Pinball, not Virtual Pinball. 

With regards to your comment that the community built the software, that is not accurate.  The Visual Pinball was built and owned by Randy Davis with help from others.  Future Pinball was built by Chris Leathley.  They own those products.  The community didn't build them, and has received them completely free of charge.  It is up to Randy and Chris was versions are release in the future and whether or not they are free.  I have no ability to control that.  Neither of these projects are open source.  I can not speak for Randy or Chris, but I don't foresee them not releasing future updates to the community.  I have certainly encouraged it, and taken steps to make sure that work that I was involved with was made available to the community.

Visual Pin Mame is much more of an open source style project, and like MAME, has been built by the community.  Given that, I see no way that I, or anyone else, could possibly somehow remove it from the community.

With regards to tables and the community, my past record shows that I have taken steps to compensate those involved in table creation and/or recreation.  (note:  there appears to be the exception of Shiva whose work was apparently inappropriately used by Global VR, not by me).  The table recreation do represent an interesting issue in that they make use of copyrighted and trademarked material.  In working with the various rights owners, I'm doing everything that I can to ensure that the community will have legal access to these materials in the future.

My intentions are, and always have been commercial.  Not that I don't love what I do, but I do make money at it.  I have never hidden this fact.  I do believe that commercial products and the online communities can not only co-exist, but benefit from each others existence.



SithMaster:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on July 17, 2008, 11:10:27 am ---It always cracked me up that the visual pinball table designers determined that they needed compensation... let's see... an illegal derivative product... and you want to be paid for it?  How about we just not sue you?

I always thought giving them some compensation was an extremely generous move.




--- End quote ---

Well to be fair they did spend time making the tables so it could be seen as compensation for time and effort for a re-creation.

Ummon:

--- Quote from: SithMaster on July 17, 2008, 12:59:33 pm ---
--- Quote from: pinballjim on July 17, 2008, 11:10:27 am ---It always cracked me up that the visual pinball table designers determined that they needed compensation... let's see... an illegal derivative product... and you want to be paid for it?  How about we just not sue you?

I always thought giving them some compensation was an extremely generous move.




--- End quote ---

Well to be fair they did spend time making the tables so it could be seen as compensation for time and effort for a re-creation.

--- End quote ---

Simpler: they made the tables for the community, free of charge. The marketing of those tables in UltraPin didn't infringe on the VP community, but it would generate revenue for someone, and the authors felt entitled to some of that.

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