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...).

[texmex]

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...).

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

[wziard]

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

Gah, my brain had parsed that as pyrollo's sig and not as part of the message. Sorry.

[Dokimi]

Speaking of greater collaboration...

Obviously you are looking for a C++ developer, but are you also interested in working more with the many other skilled people here?

As has been mentioned, we have many teachers around here. As for myself... this project is about "climate change and .. ecological issues." This is something I have a professional interest in, (I have tried bringing ecology into Minetest mods already e.g. Ecobots (a little broken now!), and Aotearoa). Many people here are already making educational content of relevance to you.

Perhaps some mutually beneficial way of collaborating can be set up?

[texmex]

Speaking of greater collaboration...

Obviously you are looking for a C++ developer, but are you also interested in working more with the many other skilled people here?

As has been mentioned, we have many teachers around here. As for myself... this project is about "climate change and .. ecological issues." This is something I have a professional interest in, (I have tried bringing ecology into Minetest mods already e.g. Ecobots (a little broken now!), and Aotearoa). Many people here are already making educational content of relevance to you.

Perhaps some mutually beneficial way of collaborating can be set up?

Now we're talking!

[EvidenceBKidscode]

Speaking of greater collaboration...

Obviously you are looking for a C++ developer, but are you also interested in working more with the many other skilled people here?

As has been mentioned, we have many teachers around here. As for myself... this project is about "climate change and .. ecological issues." This is something I have a professional interest in, (I have tried bringing ecology into Minetest mods already e.g. Ecobots (a little broken now!), and Aotearoa). Many people here are already making educational content of relevance to you.

Perhaps some mutually beneficial way of collaborating can be set up?

Hello Dokimi, yes of course we're not just looking for developers but anyone who has an interest in both Minetest and kidscode is welcome to contribute to our project. I'm sure that we can find common grounds to start collaborating and making sure that both our company and anybody here can be satisfied. Just like with Minetest, we have in mind this ideal to create a community of people who are passionate about education and games. And who else than teachers know what's best for their students ?

Just for the sake of being organized, it is best to contact us at contact@kidscode.com and briefly tell us who you are, what you do or what you've created in Minetest or on any other platform that has an educational interest. We will be happy to carry on from there and set up a meeting by skype, discord or google hangouts.

We're aware that many people here could be of a great help to our project, let's just start by creating a small community here to facilitate any exchange between kidscode and minetest.

[Pyrollo]

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 :)

Hello, and thanks for your kindly answer. We are about to start working on that.

First step may be to merge Kidscode changes into a fresh Minetest 5 fork. This will help us to inventory the changes and make it possible to propose PR for current version. Then will have to identify most significant changes and set up PRs.

I hope to have some results soon !

[texmex]

This sounds as quite an opportunity to grow a Minetest ecosystem of projects and ventures. :)

[Pyrollo]

This sounds as quite an opportunity to grow a Minetest ecosystem of projects and ventures. :)

I hope so !

[R-One]

Hello,

Being myself French, I want to point out that I sent an email on May 31, 2018 to Kidscode stating that I had found no one by a page on the license and mention on the download page of their client and it would be possible to enlighten me on your policy compared to the use of this license? by the way I recalled the conditions of license license LGPL 2.1+

I received a reply on 01 June 018 from the CEO:

Hello,

Thank you very much for your message.

We have been busy with kidscode and we have not had time to update all our mentions on all media.

I will make sure that the legal notice regarding our use of a modified version of the game engine Minetest appear in the right places, including the kidscode software and the download page of the software.

In accordance with the provisions of the LGPL v2.1 + license, we are making available our modified version of the LGPL v2.1 + licensed game engine, thus transferring our work on the engine to the open source community.

I hope that answers your question. These mentions will be put in place quickly.

We had a lot of contacts with Minetest teams in the past, especially with Perttu Ahola, whom I have several times informed about the progress of our project for Education, and they have always been very cordial. Several people who have contributed to kidscode have also contributed to Minetest in the past.

Do not hesitate to come back to us if you have any other comments regarding our obligations.

A few days later, I looked and yes a mention to minetest was hidden I do not remember too much where at the time of downloading the client kidscode ... but for my part I put already made an idea on this kind of business.

[R-One]

Here is how to find mention of Minetest on the site, it is at the time of the download of the client.

You must first click on a button:



Then scroll