Soku Lobby – Open Source
August 25th, 2011 
dotMaiku Due to the amount of work I have this semester, I cannot update Soku Lobby as frequently as I have in the past. I have decided to make the source code available to anyone who wishes to help develop it. Just email me and I’ll send you a link to the code (if you’re serious about development). Anyone that contributes to the development gets an achievement.
The program is written in C# and you’ll need some programming knowledge to develop it. The internal functions are a bit messy and undocumented, but the public methods are documented fairly well. You can email dotMaiku if you have any questions on how to do something. The server code is not available due to security concerns.
I am currently the only person that can publish and push out new versions to the public. So if you have code you think works, and have tested it, you can send it to me, and I’ll see about putting it in. Currently, spectating netcode is implemented, but desyncs all the time. I’ll give some donation money (and an achievement) to whoever fixes it before me.
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why not just post the code if you want to make it opensource.
Because I would like to know who’s working on the code. If everyone could view the code, then who knows how many different branches of “Soku Lobby” there would be floating around. It makes it easier to know who’s working on it, so when they do make a change, I can push it out globally. I’m the only one that can do that.
Why do you afraid of forks?
You can e.g. put your code at github and community (if it interested) will push patches back to you.
As long as you will remain active, your branch will be the main branch.
You don`t loose anything, only get.
This is how opensource works.
I know how open source “works,” I’m involved in a couple of other projects. The issue I have with forks is the compatibility. For example, someone could change the netcode in one branch, and someone does it different in another. Then there’s the issue of “how do we merge this, and who’s right?” On top of that, since the netcode was changed, it’s only compatible with others whom have that branch. This makes a big mess for people when they’re trying to find a game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to restrict what people do with the code, I just don’t want multiple public versions floating around that aren’t compatible with each other. If someone were to change the GUI, but keep the netcode (so it was compatible), there would be no problem with that.