i am intreged
“intreged” by attention, you mean
I don’t know yet. There are lots of things to consider.
I’m trying it to see, and what I’ve done so far (not alot) it seems good. I have some things I’m not sure of yet, but thats why i’m trying it.
I’m also unsure of what the license will be like. J2EE stack is completely free to use, even in a commercial environment, I’m fairly sure SGS will not be free for commercial use, but I don’t know about free to play software.
Endolf
License models are being worked out along with the rest of that MBA junk.
What I can say(which is very little) is this:
J2EE made sun almost no money. I don’t think we want to make exactly the same mistake twice.
BUT a big part of our goal with this is to stimulate and expand the online game-industry, which means getting the small shop and indy developers much more invovled then they have been to date. Thats a philisophical strong point of many of us invovled with this. I came from the game-development garage and its where my heart is. Sun Labs is very much a group of eclectics and individuals and thus the cocnept also resonates strongly with the labs itself.
So what we are working on are models that allow Sun to preserve the ability to make money, while also enabling the small guys to be part of that money making industry, and giving our bigger more traditional type partners a role too.
Now ASIDE from all that, there is the question of non-commercial use. To be honest we likely won’t address that til after we have the money part figured out. (We have to enentually pay for this growing team somehow.) But its not something thats totally off our radar either.
SO I cant make ANY promises or gaurantees today, but at least you know the direction our hearts and minds are calling us…
Aye
I currently have a webstart version of my current code up. It’s completely unfinished, does almost nothing, but I do have people occasionally run it so I can see performance/remote tests. As the server is always running, I don’t stop anyone running it, so strickly speaking I guess I’m already breaking the license.
This poses the question of if I can’t run it, should I look else where?. Whilst I understand that SUN is a company and needs to make money, I guess it means I have to find an alternative that will let me use it for free (all the time I charge nothing), or write something, which sucks, cause I really wanted to use SGS, and I know it’s alot of work and I won’t get anything like the capabilities I get with SGS.
Whilst I don’t doubt Jeff’s desires for the project, I know how slow lawyers can be, so I will have to write my code carefully so that I can swap out SGS quickly if I have too :(.
Assuming I ever get anything finished (not that likely :)), my plan was that the players would not have to pay to play. All the time the user base is small I can host 1 server on the box I share with Kev. As/if things grow then hardware/bandwidth would be sponsered by adverts at space stations etc in game (like billboards on the road, subtle so as not to interrupt game play, but large enough that people will see them) and that would cover costs. Obviosuly growing costs implies a larger user base so more users would see the advert and more revenue could be generated. I don’t know anything about the games industry, but hopefully that would work for a small, non commercial game :). The idea is just to cover costs, not make any profit. Maybe SUN would like to donate SGS and somewhere to run it for some space station adverts ;).
Endolf
One I didnt hear you and if i didnt hear you, nobody knows…
Two I really dont thin its a huge deal as long as you are keepign it to ap rivate group.
Im nto sure what the lciense says but we WANT you to develo pwtih it and that ofcourse assumes some testing.
We’re workign on the non-comemrical angle, As soon as yo ustart realizing revenue though, and adverts woudl def be revenue, then youcross the line to commerical. We’re working on the commerical models now so now is the time for input.
Ad revenue driven is a new twist on our thinking. FRankly I think you’re pretty brave because from what I knwo of the industry from my time at TEN/Pogo it takes HUGE numbers of eyes (“impressions”) to make anything at all on ad revenue. The problem being that price is absed on supply and deamnd and it is just to damn easy for someoen to slap up a web site and create more online advertising space supply. Havr you doen any research into whatthe industry is currently paying per impression for different lkinds of ads?
In any event its at least worth our talking about in our model discussions. I’ll mention it to the MBA…
So thinking about this further…
Can i sugegst something to you? You probably don’t WANT to be running your own servers. This is particualrly true in your ad revenue model because it is SO important that end users find you in large numbers.
We are talking now tih some very very BIG sites. Some of the biggest ad revenue based sites in the business, about actually being Darkstar hosting providers to small third parties and they are very intrested.
I’d think the BEST model for you would be to publish through one of these guys
(a) You incurr NO hosting costs of your own
(b) You have their customer support
© You get access to a huge existing user base
(d) You get access to their ad sales team (an important part of the puzzle most small dveleopers forget)
Yes you will have to split the money iwth them but there will be a lot more money to split…
If I were a small company, paritiualrly looking at ad revenue, thats how Id want to go.
Coo
Sounds interesting 
Endolf
I read on some newssite that Sun wanted to make it possible to run SGS on the Sun Grid ($1/ CPU hour) for serious projects like MMORPGs. (real ones… :))
Dont believe evrything you read.
The press have Darkstar and Grid all confused.
The current Sun Grid has no capability to run net applciations of any kind-- its purely a compoute farm.
We have been talking with the grid foks about the grid future and how we might play on it but even we have no idea where that wil lgo or when.
We might wells et up our own Darkstar provier, or we might just work with our hosting partners. None of this is decided yet. But if we did do it orusleves there is no reason we woudl necessarily use the same billing model as the existing grid.