Would it work?

You've been reading my site again, haven't you?

I read it a lot, but I don't remember anything about open-sourcing...

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I didn't mean laws, I meant whether or not formulae would benefit from improvement by a gigantic open-source community the way Linux does?

More descriptive thread openers would be nice.

And not much, IMO. Magic is a highly personal art combined with science, some bizarre combination of calculus and poetry, faith and ritual. I suppose a group working on a spell formula could get +1 dice pool for every member, using rules similar to ritual spellcasting.

What if the spell formulae available for purchase already include having been worked on in an open source environment?

As there are now professors and doctorates in Thaumaturgy, I could see an Open-Source magic group to be shunned or looked down upon by the more established 'experts' in the field of magic.

Effectively you are looking at a broad-spectrum magic group, so the concept is rather intreguing

well, there are professors and doctorates of computer science as well--many of whom are Linux-users.

that said, i doubt an open-source formula would get above F6 or so, and only for non-damaging spells. the trade of formulae for damaging spells is illegal without a license in most jurisdictions, i believe.

haha. well, that might not stop shadowrunners, true. but it will generally retard the number of legitimate mages who take part.

no, but they can certainly prove that the formula itself was posted to a public board by you, unless you've got some decking skillz. we're not talking about the illegality of casting the spell, we're talking about the illegality of sharing the formula with others.

you could spread high-end ones by word-of-mouth, and mages who are friends might do that. but word-of-mouth is not going to give you very wide distribution, which means open-sourcing the formula will be largely useless, as you won't have lots of brilliant magical minds working on improving it.

This has to be one of the weirdest weeks ever. I've agreed with SLJames, blakkie, and mfb within two days. Now if only Cain would post something I could agree with we can finish out all 4 prophecies of the apocalypse.

Translation without smarminess: I agree with SLJames's last post.

What about Magicknet and Magick Undernet?

And according to the DMA, their creation and distribution are crimes once they begin to crack encryption designed to secure copyrights.

that's pretty stupid. it's like saying that owning a gun is illegal once you start shooting at someone.

which actually makes sense. bugger. just shot myself down.

They could just give the formulae to a few people, then those people give those spells to a few people; it's like Pay It Forward with fireballs! I'd assume that sort of network would actually disseminate the formulae VERY quickly; maybe a few hundred people within a week, with each one knowing only the person who gave it to him directly and being more or less trustworthy enough not to give it to just anybody. Kind of like the drug trade and how it kind of owns the government when it comes to the drugs sold/drugs found ratio.

And would these formulae be better or worse than corp-made ones?

the thing with the drug trade is, there's money involved. people buy the drugs, therefore people make money moving the drugs. with open-source stuff, there's no real motivation, unless the trade is actually open.

Open? You mean without risk? Maybe there are splinter magic groups who are against the corporatizatin of magic that make and refine spell formulae, distribute them to their friends outside the group, and then those people are like, "What the hell, I'll give this to my friends too." I mean, with magic formulae, cops are going to be MUCH less suspicious of a few tribal-looking scrawls on paper that you could say is artwork than they will be of powder in bags. I'd say there's much less risk with fireball 8.0 than there is with heroin.

Open source formulae would be like pirated software today. Lots of people doing it just because they want to stick it to the man. For the most part though I think what you get for free would be worse then what you could buy. Two reasons:

1) Think of Open Source spell formulae as Linux. Free, stable, does what it's supposed to. Unfortunately you need a doctorate in computer science to try and install the thing from source code. The spell formula you buy is like Linux Red Hat: user friendly, easy to install, does what it's supposed to do with a spiffy GUI instead of a command line.

2) Game balance. This may not mean much from an emo samurai standpoint, but the costs for spell formula are a limiting factor. Tossing them out the window puts a strain on game balance.

sure, like i said--if you're friends with another mage, you might work on spells together. or if you're in a small network of mages, or whatever. but as far as actually making a fireball spell formula public knowledge, where anyone who's interested can view it and speak up with their own additions and improvments--in other words, making the spell open source--i don't see that happening very often, with dangerous spells.

Dude, they're, like, 2,000 for combat spell formulae in SR4. Game balance isn't an issue for us.

And since when were spell formulae for people other than professionals?

...right, sure. people with magical talents who don't use them in their career wouldn't want formulae.

If I lived in the Sixth World where walking 15 meters from my apartment in my corporation's seal arcology to my workplace in the same sealed arcology put me at risk of being killed by shadowrunners, ecoterrorists, corrupted magicians, crazed adepts, psycotic cyborgs, rabid shapeshifters,mMalignant spirits and disgruntled paraanimals I would damn sure be packing a SMG and wearing full body armor every single day. And if I were a magician I would know as many combat spells as I could learn just in case I ever need them.

I meant that people who use magic are the magical equivalents of professional programmers; if they can cast spells, period, they've got enough magical theory and raw talent to use complex manipulations of mana. I don't really think any spell formula is genuinely "user-friendly;" anyone using one will be able to understand perfectly what would look like freaky scribblings to anyone else.

I'm not sure I'd agree that they have low force. Criminals like bigger guns. I will agree that corporate wage slaves probably aren't involved, but that doesn't really matter.

Will they be higher or lower quality than consumer formulae? Like, would their drain codes be worse and stuff?

I'd say lower quality (force is reduced by one, higher drain, or something similar), but I care about game balance.

Realistically, though? If it turned out like Linux? Then again, spell formulae probably aren't Microsoft quality, since there's actual competition in that area...

more that anybody with the know-how to make higher-force spells would be unlikely to share their knowledge so freely. sure, there are open-source programs out there that can crack copyright protection--which is about what i'd expect, personally, from a rating 4, 5, or 6 program. same goes with spells, to me, and doubly so for destructive spells.

Look at my example above. Linux by itself is a nightmare to someone who doesn't do that sort of thing on a regular basis. Paying for it gets you the great GUI. Maybe it doesn't change the way the spell works, but it could greatly change the learning time.

<pulling numbers out of my ass>
Assume Linux takes 12 man hours to install and get configured (this seems reasonable given that a single module might take 2 hours to compile: http://wiki.lunar-linux.org/index.php/How_long).

Redhat linux (the version you pay for) take 10 minutes to install via a wizard.

Open Source linux takes almost 100 times as long to install.
</pulling numbers out of my ass>

Change "install" to "learn" and you've got a huge differential.

I personally think that performance would be less. Performance with programs on linux vs. redhat can be worse if you don't memorize the command line arguments or miss something in configuration. The GUI has checkboxes for all that stuff. Likewise an open source spell might have a harder time syncing itself to a target's aura or shutting itself down (i.e. higher drain).

Oh... but what if you modify it while learning it so that it attunes itself to its aura? Like, if you customize the formula yourself? Then I'd imagine it would be better for drain.

eh, meh. i personally would just say it's a lower force, rather than saying it's higher force with extra drain.

Bah.... MUNCHKINS UNITE KEKEKEKEKEKKEEEEEEEEE!!!

I meant the above completely unironically.

I'm so happy that I'm able to say the above without being banned like on Something Awful.

But seriously, how would you go about customizing a spell to your aura, and would you award bonuses for using spells you design?

Maybe, but that also takes time. So now not only are you taking 100 times as long to learn it you're also having to spend time modifying it. Meanwhile you could have instead just apid for it with the money you got by spending 6 of those 60 hours doing a run.

it just doesn't mesh will with my ideas about how magic works. they're not, to me, like computer programs, where you can have a buggy version that still gets the job done. i view 'em as being pretty much binary--they are the spell, or they aren't the spell. this meshes, to me, with the way learning spells works--no discounts for already knowing a lower-force version.

incidentally, i was completely wrong on how spell formulae work. formulae cannot be shared between traditions.

Reading this I have learned nothing except for the fact that no one here understands linux.

First, the linux kernel is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

http://www.linux.org/info/gnu.html

One of the provisions of the GPL is that all derivative work must be open source. Because of this most versions of Linux are available for free download, including Redhat. If you wanted a CD, then you would have to pay the distrobution costs. If you pay for a linux distribution like Redhat what you are paying for is consumer support and a warrenty, not the product itself.

https://www.redhat.com/

Take a good look at Redhat's website. They go to great pains to specify that you aren't paying for the operating system. You are paying for a subscrition to a "solution." What's more, there is a free version of Redhat available on the same page for "noncritical" systems.

Second, the vast majority of linux dristributions include GUIs now. There are several graphical desktop enviroments available that are easily integrated into any distribution of linux.

Installing and setting up Debian from a CD takes about 5 minutes and the Gnome desktop enviroment is automaticly installed with it unless you choose to diable that option.

Being an Open Source fan and a SR gamemaster, I have always wondered about this. But here is the conclusions that I reached :
First, Open Source works because people writing software are, by definition, computer literate, and know of the best ways to share the information, be it stealthily in some gray cases. In 2060's we suppose that magicians are generally not very computer litterate, most of them, that is. So you could consider that spell informations on the Matrix is about as usable as instructions to build a blast furnace on today's internet (in fact they ARE pretty usable but only the work of hobbyists)

Second, there is a closer equivalent in real life to spell formulae than computer program. This is magical tricks used by nowadays magicians (I mean people like David Copperfield). Such tricks are shared and swapped among the magician community, some are sold at very high prices and few of them end on the internet because it is in no magician's interest. Some do it for ideological reasons but, well, we could call them "burnouts" now

I think the only reason why open-source spells should be somehow restricted is if you're trying to stick to the rules a lot and/or want to make this a game-balance tool.

I mean, try this:
Say I'm a grade 2 initiate, trying to create a force 5 spell. The first thing I do is that I undertake a rating 3 astral quest (a piece of cake for such a mage); this, coupled with my spell design 5, gives me 8 dice. If the drain code for the spell is +1(M), which is a pretty common one, I roll my dice against TN=(2*5)-8+1=3, getting say 5 successes - it takes me 4 days to design the spell. A +1(S) force 5 spell would take approximately 8 days (average), still not a lot for a formula one pays 5000Y for on the street. The design process can be freely interrupted, so I can work on it whenever I have an hour or two of free time. Heck, with spell design this easy I can see some mages designing all kinds of spells in their free time, and the short time even a single person needs to create a working formula means there'd be a lot of working formulas out there. Even a runner will find it worth his time to design and publish such a spell, because he creates the spell for himself, knows it inside and out, and making it public means he won't be the only one using this particular spell.

And even if the mage is uninitiated (and uncybered), the base TN for a force 4 spell is (2+drain modifier), and (4+drain modifier) for a force 5 one, making it a relatively easy task.

Of course, the force 6+ spells, or those with a D drain code, will be much rarer, and there'll be gazillions of spells like Force 1 "Make Soft-Drink Glow Purple" or "Animate Paperclips"... But I'm sure there would be quite many force 3 to 5, L to S drain spells that are actually useful, and even some of the high-force, high drain ones.

If we go by canon, then the Awakened are far from computer illiterate:

Taking into consideration legality codes, Im sure you could easly find anything with a non D drain code thats force 3 or under. In fact if I had a player willing to cough up the 1,000 a year for a MN membership, Id give him acess to anything under 5. Force 6 or higher, and especally force 6 D or higher, thats the differenace between buying a .38 special, and an Ak-47.
Or prehaps the differance between pirating an Mp3, and... well I cant think of anything that big off hand, but if I do you'll be the first to know.