We're looking for a skilled C++ developer

[EvidenceBKidscode]

Hello everyone, I am the founder of kidscode www.kidscode.com and since our first developments in 2017 we have been working with the Minetest engine as part of our education startup.

We're currently working on a big project involving climate change and natural disasters simulations, which ultimately will help children grow aware of the ecological issues.

We already have two developpers working on it, but a third one will be a great addition to the team.

So this is when you come in ! If you are passionate about 3D sandbox game, and would like to help us transforming the future of education and are familiar with C++, we would love to hear from you ! if you can spare some time to speak to us in more detail, please let us know and tell us more about you at contact@kidscode.com !

We look forward to hearing from you ;)

[texmex]

Sounds fun for someone with the C++ skillset. Just to clarify: you’re looking to hire someone to code a fork of the Minetest engine? Will you try to contribute back?

Btw, web site is broken (”An error has occured” on every page. iOS Safari with tracker blocker)

[sofar]

Texmex' reply sums up my perspective. But I'd like to elaborate my concerns:

One one side I'm really interested and hope this is successful. On the other side I'm concerned that there is no benefit to the Minetest community here. I see no significant mentions of Minetest on your website, and despite you working on this for 2 years (or more?), we've seen very little to no contributions back to Minetest. I have to dig down in the french blog to find a discussion that suggests that your software is no longer map-compatible with Minetest. This isn't a good way to start collaborating with us.

I'd love for this to change. The Minetest community would love to see the project be a vehicle for educational purposes and while ideally we feel that everything should remain open source, we also want small organizations to be empowered, of course all within the LGPL of course. If you do modify the engine, don't be a wimp and hide your GPL compliance requirements behind a paywall and registration, just post the source code somewhere so that we can openly discuss and consider improvements.

I'd love for there to be a mutually beneficial engagement. If kidscode contributes back to the community, I'm sure some of the dozens of teachers that frequent the forums will be delighted and much more interested in working with you.

[runs]

Yeah, as the other guys/girls wisely said, if you modify the engine (C++ developing points to), you have to contribute to Minetest, legally and morally.

It's not a problem to make some money, creating amazing worlds and contributing to enhance child education. I just wow when I watched the Rome City on your video. But the GPL obligates to share the code of the engine, not mods nor textures nor all the rest.

Here a Minetest developer had problems to survive in London, as I read in a post on this forum, he told he starved and today is still very poor. You 'should' give him some money at least.

If you do not contribute and separate from this project, you will eventually reach an alley if you leave.

[EvidenceBKidscode]

Hello everyone and thank you all for your replies !
It is not our intention to keep everything for ourselves and never give back to the community. It is quite the opposite actually but the thing is we don't know how to do it, and what form should our modifications take in order to be shared with you.

We definitely need your help here as we require specific instructions on the possibilities to share our progress on the engine with you. We realized that putting the source code out there is not enough, and it will require someone to analyze it, find what's new in it and adapt it to your current version of Minetest.
For instance we are going to develop a 3D isometric view on kidscode and other simulation tools that you might find useful. It would be nice to have someone from the community be the liaison between EvidenceBkidscode and the Minetest community, someone we could work with on our project, contact regularly and who could explain us/help us share our engine improvements.

Please let us know if any of you is interested, so we can organize a meeting with our developpers and talk about it in details.

Kind regards

[wziard]

but the thing is we don't know how to do it

I find this a bit hard to believe, actually.

It's very easy. If you modify a (L)GPL program and you want to distribute the result, you have to make the source code available somewhere.

Of course it's even better if you do more than that, but *at the very least* that's what you should do.

Just open a github account already and put your source in it.

Sorry if I sound a bit annoyed (ok I am a bit annoyed), because you probably mean well. But I've seen OS projects getting completely torn apart by weasely worded commercial parties before and I'd be sad if that happened to MineTest.

'We'd like to share but don't know how' doesn't cut it! Just share.

[Pyrollo]

Hello,

I worked a bit for Kidscode and I am about to work again for them. I'm also developping mods for myself (distributed under free licenses), and trying to contribute to some others.

Minetest code modified by Kidscode has always been republished (according to the GPL terms)(1). As far as I know, for now, modifications are mostly adaptations to Kidscode project.

Now the question is: how to provide a real feed back to the community? Sharing the code is not enough. What EvidenceBKidscode meant by "we don't know how to do it" was about how to do that. I guess the best practice would be to open PRs and push them back to the Minetest project.

Anyway they are very open to contribute. They haven't spent time on that aspect yet (small company, many things to do, day to day business, I guess you can imagine).

Please excuse us, we are all french speakers and it's not always easy express ourselves clearly.

(1) You can find it here :
https://github.com/far27Q5T32x/adel.git
https://github.com/far27Q5T32x/minetest_game

[sofar]

Now the question is: how to provide a real feed back to the community? Sharing the code is not enough. What EvidenceBKidscode meant by "we don't know how to do it" was about how to do that. I guess the best practice would be to open PRs and push them back to the Minetest project.

This is a great question. I would strongly suggest identifying where you have fixed bugs and made meaningful changes that are beneficial to everyone, and post those. Best would be as a PR, second best would be to open a github issue and demonstrate the change. There are other ways, but code is a very compatible language for discussing changes :)

[runs]

Sorry, I thought you don't share the source code ;-/

Code: Select all

We realized that putting the source code out there is not enough

No, it is enough to put the source code, in fact.

Furthermore, you can help to clarify what is new or not. But this is your intention and you have not the obligation to do it.

But really, your help is important, the Minetest community is anchored in the past, a new vision will always be good. You have to open thousand of PR and 'obligate' to Minetest to go forward, official developers are now shooting flies with an elephant gun (cos they are a little team, it is not a personal attack). A commercial vision would be cool.

[sofar]

No, it is enough to put the source code, in fact.

Furthermore, you can help to clarify what is new or not. But this is your intention and you have not the obligation to do it.

But really, your help is important, the Minetest community is anchored in the past, a new vision will always be good. You have to open thousand of PR and 'obligate' to Minetest to go forward, official developers are now shooting flies with an elephant gun (cos they are a little team, it is not a personal attack). A commercial vision would be cool.

If you can't make a coherent statement, please, just don't. Random statements like this are not useful. You're doing more damage than helping this way.

[Pyrollo]

You have to open thousand of PR and 'obligate' to Minetest to go forward, official developers are now shooting flies with an elephant gun (cos they are a little team, it is not a personal attack).

This is unlikely to happen. Commercial company does not mean billions of dollars and army of devs. It's a small company with a little team and not much resources. I guess some usefull PRs will be posted, but no radical change made on Minetest (or maybe... in case of great success).

[runs]

No, it is enough to put the source code, in fact.

Furthermore, you can help to clarify what is new or not. But this is your intention and you have not the obligation to do it.

But really, your help is important, the Minetest community is anchored in the past, a new vision will always be good. You have to open thousand of PR and 'obligate' to Minetest to go forward, official developers are now shooting flies with an elephant gun (cos they are a little team, it is not a personal attack). A commercial vision would be cool.

If you can't make a coherent statement, please, just don't. Random statements like this are not useful. You're doing more damage than helping this way.

I only want Minetest to improve, not to be a troll/hater/stupid forumer. Or maybe yes, but for cause of language barriers, not my intention. It's not a critic to personal developers, just to Minetest in general. Hytale with only 2 years of development is a very promising thing. I desire for Minetest the same speed up and dynamics.

That french enterprise are hurry up to release cool products to its customers, or they bankrupt. If they collaborate with Minetest would be cool. Minetest needs a Steve Jobs or Hideo Kojima, a genius with a vision of future and prosperity.

In the Ancient Rome sometimes citizens elected a dictator to leader them when hard epochs Sometimes too much democracy is not cool. It is needed a single person/group with ambitions to do greats things.

[sofar]

I only want Minetest to improve, not to be a troll/hater/stupid forumer. Or maybe yes <snip>

Sigh.

[wziard]

Good to hear that the changes always were published. Maybe a better job could have been done telling people where :-)

But I understand how it works in small firms. I'm in one myself. Always lots of stuff that 'should have been done yesterday'.

Sorry to have misinterpreted the 'we don't know how' part. I've seen that exact phrase (ab)used by firms with the sole purpose of delaying releasing their sources. Together with 'we first need to clean it up a bit'.

Anyway, my advice still stands: create a github repo with your version. It's the easiest way, and if you do it early on you don't have a lot of work separating out your own proprietary stuff from the open source stuff. Because I *know* it'll get mixed up if you don't release from the start. I've done that sort of refactoring once and it was no fun at all (had it been my choice I'd have released *everything* as OSS, but managers...).