Commercial Homebrew And Coders Rights

[wraggster]

The Homebrew and Emulation Scenes span so many consoles now that it is truly amazing to see so many sites and coders and fans worldwide, a natural progression is to see Homebrew and Emulators going commercial in some form. The excellent releases from the Dreamcast Scene especially from the likes of Dan potter (http://gamedev.allusion.net/softprj/kos/scene.php) and in particular Feet of Fury show the full potential of what can be done, the somewhat murky waters come in if the original code is by another coder.

Recently the announcement that a donation when buying a Pandora Console will get you access to betas (http://pandora.dcemu.co.uk/pandora-dev-fund-announcement-117656.html) is also a good idea in General but the problems lie if say someone ports for instance PCSX to the Pandora and they get cash but in all fairness the original coder also deserves cash for the work in coding the emu in the first place.

Moving on from that in the Iphone scene there are some coders who have a donation scheme to get beta access to the releases that they are working on. Now yes the coder doing the work to port to say Iphone/Pandora etc deserves some of the takings but shouldnt the original coder deserve some too?

Finally across the Whole Homebrew community theres been some awesome coding contests but when a release is a port or has taken code (no matter how much it changed from the original source) shouldnt the original coder or team get some of the prizes ?

Is the only way forward to have contests with only original coders/work allowed ?

Obviously if you are the original coder then this post means nothing if you port to other consoles or indeed sell as commercial homebrew but its interesting to hear the thoughts of both members and coders thoughts on the items raised.

[Eviltaco64]

Id contact the original coder.
If he fell off the face of the Earth, what would happen then?

[gamesquest1]

well i would think that the original creator should get most of it its getting paid for the coding basically and if sombody cant create the code themselves because they arnt good enougth and use other peoples why should they get the money which is basically for good coding, alls they are basically doing is tweaking it i dont think major companies would like it if a normal person tweaked there game a little bit then got all the money for programming it, money payes for original coders time and effort i think

[goity]

It's not about not being good enough - it's about having a usable codebase that doesn't take forever and a day to get running.
I have no problem with a coder receiving the donation for his/her work, after all the money wouldn't have been given to the original coder in the first place and therefore nobody is depriving anyone of anything. If a certain app hadn't been ported to the iphone by the coder who receives the money, nobody with an iphone would be able to use it, and nobody would give or receive donations or prizes.

However, it probably should be taken account of in competitions, because of the lower amount of work sometimes needed for ports, though this counts less for major changes which must be done for emulators.