FreeGameDev

I’ve recently had a look over the source code and now I am a bit worried now.

I found some EXE, DLL and BAT files, all files specifically for Windows.

First of all: Why all those binary files in the source tree? That doesn’t make much sense to me.


And I found quite some C# files. GitHub reports that 8.5% of all source code is in C#. This worries me a lot.

I am not very happy with C#. It is not the language syntax or the langague, I don’t have a problem with that. It is the “aura” that surrounds C# which scares me:

• Microsoft has a lot of scary patents accociated with it; I don’t trust them when they say they won’t use these against free software projects. Apparently there is nothing preventing them to legally threaten any free software (and other) projects which use C# somehow. If they choose to do so, it would get ugly.
• .NET Framework is a de-facto crucial part of C# and proprietary software. How does TOL solve that problem?
• I know, there’s the Mono project but I am deeply skeptical about their intentions. Mono is led by Novell, which in turn is highly influenced by Microsoft. Mono may be free software, but the Mono project is clearly not independent.
• The reference implementation is proprietary software: Visual Studio
• C# has an ISO standard associtated with it, but it is not complete. This makes Microsoft’s proprietary software accociated with C# (in one sense) privileged.

I know that the main motivation of TOL was of ROTC:E’s dependency on proprietary software and TOL’s goal is to get rid of said dependencies. But now it seems that TOL just gets rid of a single dependency (the game engine if I recall correctly), and having all those blobs and C# files in the source tree worry me.
It would be sad if TOL would indeed fall into the same trap as ROTC:E.


Any comments on this?
How important is C# in TOL and for what stuff is it used?
Is .NET or a .NET imitation required for TOL?
Are my worries justified?

Relax

- There's not C# or .net anywhere, github mistakenly reports the TorqueScript .cs files as c#
- Some binaries are kept in the source tree purely for convenience. What files exactly are you worried about?

fr1tz {l Wrote}:- There's not C# or .net anywhere, github mistakenly reports the TorqueScript .cs files as c#

.cs = TorqueScript? Meh! They couldn’t have chosen a worse file extension than that.

- Some binaries are kept in the source tree purely for convenience. What files exactly are you worried about?

Well, all binaries.

What do you mean with “convenience”?
Are all these binaries precompiled forms of free libraries or otherwise free software? Then I have no problems with that.

It seems that the GitHub repository does not reflect the final packages. This explains a lot, I guess.

Yup to the best of my knowledge their all in compliance with the MIT license that governs the distribution. I just removed the torque3d project manager windows binaries from the root of the repo, as they're not used anymore anyway.

The fact that github reporting a significant amount of c# might turn people off worries me a little bit, I wonder how that could be solved cleanly.

OK, I change the thread title to reflect that. Thank you.

fr1tz {l Wrote}:The fact that github reporting a significant amount of c# might turn people off worries me a little bit, I wonder how that could be solved cleanly.

Yeah, it is dumb that GitHub reports the files as C# when they are in fact TorqueScript.

It is not only that the file suffix is “.cs”, it is also that the syntax appears to be similar to that of C#. Which doesn’t ease things up …
At least both languages are not identical. xD

I have consulted the GitHub FAQ and found out that language recognition is made by a library from GitHub called “linguist” and that I should create an GitHub issue when there’s a false-positive. I have done so, here you can track the issue:
https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/1512

Nice, thanks