Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

General discussion of the port and Doom-related chat.
Mobius
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#41

Post by Mobius » Wed Mar 14, 2018 2:03 am

buckshot wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:49 am
It's not a group entirely composed of people wanting to do zandro multiplay, lol. I never said it was. It's just a DOOM fan group. Many of which do, in fact, play DOOM multiplay. Probably some here that are even members. But not all. Maybe, probably not even most. But I do try to get many interested in playing it. I don't necessarily care what servers they play on, so long as they're playing.

No troll here, and I haven't made any purchase of anything recently that I regret. I'm not really advertising my servers as you so put it... rather I've created them for those in our doom group (and anyone else, here or anywhere for that matter) for community events and nightly plays. Everything I've told you is truth, whether you choose to beleive that or not, I guess thats upto you. I came here to defend VGP, who has helped me quite a bit, and I feel this entire thread has been pretty harsh on them. I just thought perhaps if folks heard both side of the story, then maybe that'd bring to light that the guys who run VGP aren't quite what people are making them out to be.

if you do care to check out the group if you have doubts, feel free:
facebook.com/groups/doomgame

You can find me there, as Admin Strunk.
I know a friend of mine who played doom once in his life and I am pretty sure he'd join that group to just to show support. It still leaves to wonder why you'd make the purchase for players especially "hardcore veterans" who couldn't help you set up a vanilla doom server but yet you reference dwango and pay 120 dollars for someone to make a config of barrel respawn, hazard suits, and MAYBE double ammo. You mean none of those guys out of 15k couldn't do that on tspg and lead from there or are we talking about 14,992 people who joined and only 8 of them actually play doom.
Ru5tK1ng wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:57 am
A3 memes, hostile environments, and Jezebel articles
And this is where I take my leave, but I agree some people are just allergic to money.
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#42

Post by buckshot » Wed Mar 14, 2018 2:26 am

Mobius wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 2:03 am

I know a friend of mine who played doom once in his life and I am pretty sure he'd join that group to just to show support. It still leaves to wonder why you'd make the purchase for players especially "hardcore veterans" who couldn't help you set up a vanilla doom server but yet you reference dwango and pay 120 dollars for someone to make a config of barrel respawn, hazard suits, and MAYBE double ammo. You mean none of those guys out of 15k couldn't do that on tspg and lead from there or are we talking about 14,992 people who joined and only 8 of them actually play doom.
First, your friend is the type of doom fan that makes up a large portion of our group. Yes, I absoutely agree on that. But that's also the same person that I'd like to try to get to play DOOM more. If we can do group events and topics that attract more attention from the casual or infrequent DOOM player, then the group is doing its purpose. YES, i agree... that's going to attract only a handful of the overall headcount of the group. But at the very least we are reaching out to some, and maybe sparking interest in it once again. Call me crazy, but I really do want those folks to come back and play or draw folks attention to DOOM. I figure by hosting servers and doing these events, that it will get more of them involved.

Second, I don't really have a good answer for that. I've hosted servers using Doomseeker/Zandro for Windows off my own desktop on and off for the past several years, however I was simply using the create a match option in doomseeker to setup game ini files. I eventually gave up on this because (a) I was doing it from my desktop which I didn't want to leave running 24/7 and (b) I don't have a static IP from my ISP. It was a pain (actually one of my previous threads from a couple years ago proves this: https://zandronum.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 289#p85289 ) I'm not a linux expert, and I up until i started learning a bit from what Miles was shwoing me, i didn't really "get" how the linux port of Zandro worked. I didn't know enough linux to comfortably get around in it to get to the point of creating those same gametypes and getting it all up in running. Yes, there's probably a good amount of people who play zandro in my group that I could have asked, but I've known Miles for some time and he has his own VGP group and he always seemed pretty confident with setting this stuff up, so I said "Shit, why not? I'll just ask miles". He's handled my buddies server, David Ganz (or you may know him as HDRAMBO) who runs a DWANGO-inspired server (and yes, i played a shit ton of DWANGO back during its heyday in DOOM/DOOM 2, as Ganz was a houston dwango admin (though i did not know him at that time). And he didn't seem to have any issue with VGP either, at least none that he mentioned to me. I guess i "could have" asked someone else from the group, but the one i knew who knew a lot about zandro hosting and dedicated servers off the top of my head was miles, so I asked him. I know thats probably doesnt answer your question, but thats the honest answer. I don't personally know who runs TSPG. I've defintley seen and heard of their servers. Even played on them quite a bit. I'm sure he or she is a awesome person and also a expert at getting these things configured. But I kind of like to stick with who I know I guess.

I mean i've already stated the reasons why I have no issue paying VGP to handle that all for me, and I think I've mentioned that repeatedly in prior posts. It's not an exorbant amount of money, not by my standards, its pretty reasonable to me. And it is my money, thus I shall do as I see fit. To make a the best comparison I can think of, I have Linux servers in the datacenter at work that I don't really understand, they're there because they have to be for certain functions required by projects and corporate teams, and even though there are many ways to do free Linux distros and all the resources out there to learn and vast communities, I really have a lot of other stuff I have to do other than just mess with Linux, so I pay RedHat engineers for support and they do their thing with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux they setup and install. Same way I treat Zandro and VGP. I really don't see why that's all too different as far as a service model goes.


.

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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#43

Post by rnd » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am

Hello,

I would like to introduce some perspective and history regarding Valhalla Game Plays. VGP started as a Youtube channel to play old school FPS games stating with (but not limited to) Doom. Miles needed to run a server where he could play with others and have some kind of voice chat at the same time.

This is where I came in. You can call me rnd, Miles often refers to me as “Random”. I am a Linux enthusiast and professional Linux server administrator. At the time I worked with Miles on the weekends and took this opportunity to suggest that Miles should run a server in “the cloud” on Linux. I knew he already had some minor experience with Linux and wanted to encourage him to build upon that knowledge (who doesn’t want to share the things they are enthusiastic about with their friends?)

We spun up a small VPS to run a game server for recordings and it was working beautifully. In the background I was setting up the system to run in a more efficient, professional and automated manner and then sharing how I accomplished that with Miles to get him more hooked on what Linux empowers you to achieve.

Within a few months we were hosting enough games that we were unable to start up any further games without causing resource contention and lag. So naturally we started a second VPS. Eventually Miles had made connections with various modders including Zedek the Plague Doctor, Sgt. Mark IV and Zanieon (the developers of Zombie Torrent II, Brutal Doom and Hunter’s Moon respectively.) We offered to host dedicated game (free of charge) to these developers whose work we enjoyed and wanted to encourage. Eventually we spun up a third server to facilitate even more games being hosted free of charge and a fourth server to host the vgp websites and other non-game services.

We found that the servers were storing duplicates of many mods and decided to create a system for cross mounting mod storage from each server to every other server. This was colloquially termed a storage “cluster” and our servers started being called a game “cluster”. I would like to point out that both uses of the term cluster are inaccurate for the work that is actually occurring, but people seem to like it similar to the way people like to talk about cross-linked and redundant datacenters selling access to VMs, network and storage as “the Cloud”. But I digress.

When VGP was … maybe a year old… a certain person we’re referring to as ‘Jeff’ in this conversation came to Miles asking us to host a game for him. Jeff showed no motivation to learn how to admin his own server and merely demanded we configure, debug and run the server and mods for him. As a result we struck a deal with him to provide support for his game to suit his desires for a reasonable $5/mo. That’s $10/yr cheeper then the low end of what WhiteAce considers reasonable in comment #27 BTW. Since we aren’t setup as a business to take funds in an automated way (and again we’re busy people) we decided to accept payment yearly. At this point Jeff has renewed his yearly service twice so he doesn’t seem to desire to leave our services any time soon. Jeff ever feel like discontinuing I’m sure it won’t be a problem to prorate the cost and refund him the amount he has overpaid. In fact I’ll suggest to Miles that we should do exactly that now that Buckshot is taking over payment for his game.

Now as grateful as we were to have Jeff as a financial contributor he is also a tiring and difficult person to work with. We tried delegating administration of his game to 3 separate admins all of whom lost or surrendered admin privileges at VGP (I can’t really say fired or quit since the role isn’t paid) because Jeff is hard to communicate with. Because of this Miles decided that if the game were to stay he would have to administer it himself, accounting for his own personal time Miles pitched Jeff to pay $10/mo or host his game somewhere else, and Jeff agreed to the new price. No gun to anyone’s head, just simple discussion and verbal agreements. We never sought out a paying client, rather he (and now buchshot) sought us out.

Our focus has always been on being an educational tool, not a commercial platform. It started as a tool for me to teach Miles how to administer Linux servers and later cascaded into an educational platform for Miles to help our game admins learn limited system administration, discord moderators to learn community moderation and communication, and modders to learn game development, coding, Git distributed source control and team collaboration. Let’s not forget Memphis who is really more teaching Miles about video production by editing our community Youtube posts.

End of history lesson, next business. Please name for me any company that actively advises customers about their competitors. I don’t see Coke commercials advising you that you could also drink Pepsi. When you go to Wells Fargo to open a bank account they don’t tell you that you could also go to Chase (unless your credit doesn’t qualify for an account…) VGP is not a business but that’s all the more reason we have no obligation to do so! The onus is on the customer/contributor/whatever to know their options We’re not about to educate every person who seeks to do business with us (without our seeking their business to begin with I might add) of their alternative options on the market, it’s just not our responsibility.

Finally how about a software licensing lesson. Zandronum seems to be licensed under a modified version of the three clause BSD license. First off modifying the official open source license is never a good idea. Second open source licenses restrict how the code therein licensed can be used, not how or under what circumstances the binary product generated from that code can be executed, so the license has absolutely nothing to say on this matter. Further the BSD license is notorious for being one of the most permissive licenses in existance short of simply releasing code as public domain.

The FreeBSD operating system is licensed under the BSD license. The BSD license is so permissive that Microsoft took the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack implementation and incorporated it into Windows 2000. The richest corporation in the world (Apple Inc) created an entire operating system (macOS) based off of FreeBSD. Apple didn’t even try to hide it precisely because the permissive nature of the BSD license makes it a non-issue.

I welcome questions and comments but I’m not the type of person who hangs out in online communities much (ask anyone in the discord how often they see me there) so responses may be slow. I passed this message by Miles considering he seems to have been banned from taking part of this conversation and he did not request for any changes to this message.


Thank you,
rnd
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#44

Post by mifu » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:08 am

We should probably lay off on the responses for this. I did mention that we are fine with charging people for hosting if thats what they want to do but we had concerns which was already highlighted in this thread.

if buckshot wants to pay them then thats fine. Now as for finding out the other half of the story as buckshot mentioned we are trying to set up a meeting with miles so we can discuss this as again, we have concerns.

As for you buckshot, sorry i have not responded to your pm as work has been busy but I'll respond later as Ive got some questions for you too in this case.

Mobius
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#45

Post by Mobius » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:18 am

rnd wrote:End of history lesson, next business. Please name for me any company that actively advises customers about their competitors. I don’t see Coke commercials advising you that you could also drink Pepsi.
So you are actively competing against TSPG then? I thought this was educational and voluntary.
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#46

Post by rnd » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:31 am

We do compete, but competition does nessicarilly mean profit is involved. We compete for members, for recognition of our works, on many levels. Even non-profit organizations compete to receive donations.

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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#47

Post by nax » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:52 am

rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am
post
This is not a business. This is not a company, this is not a country. The Master Server is not a right. Unless you are comfortable speaking for Miles, I would advise you and everyone else to stop trying to speak for him. We've already told our staff to not broach this publically any longer, and I've been moderating both sides of the aisle for this. Until this issue is resolved between zandronum staff and VGP we will treat this as a general topic.
I passed this message by Miles considering he seems to have been banned from taking part of this conversation and he did not request for any changes to this message.
I will also not have you spread an outright lie. If you attempt to social engineer this situation again I will remove you from this forum. That is final.

***EDIT: rng pm'ed me about this. he's apologized and admitted he was too hasty to say "banned". thank you

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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#48

Post by Sean » Wed Mar 14, 2018 7:12 am

rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am
The BSD license is so permissive that Microsoft took the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack implementation and incorporated it into Windows 2000.
As far as I can find, only some utilities (nslookup/ftp/telnet) are actually from BSD.
rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am
The richest corporation in the world (Apple Inc) created an entire operating system (macOS) based off of FreeBSD.
Sort of, some userland utils and the C lib were from FreeBSD, but that's pretty much the extent of it. NeXTSTEP was originally based off 4.4BSD, maybe that's what you're thinking of?


Also, general bullshit.
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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#49

Post by rnd » Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:13 pm

Sean wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 7:12 am
rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am
The BSD license is so permissive that Microsoft took the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack implementation and incorporated it into Windows 2000.
As far as I can find, only some utilities (nslookup/ftp/telnet) are actually from BSD.
rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:05 am
The richest corporation in the world (Apple Inc) created an entire operating system (macOS) based off of FreeBSD.
Sort of, some userland utils and the C lib were from FreeBSD, but that's pretty much the extent of it. NeXTSTEP was originally based off 4.4BSD, maybe that's what you're thinking of?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_ ... stribution:
Historically, BSD has been considered a branch of Unix, Berkeley Unix, because it shared the initial codebase and design with the original AT&T Unix operating system. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by vendors of workstation-class systems in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC ULTRIX and Sun Microsystems SunOS. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed, and the familiarity the founders of many technology companies of the time had with it.

Although these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded by the UNIX System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code and are the basis of other modern Unix systems), later BSD releases provided a basis for several open source development projects that are ongoing, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin, and TrueOS, among others. These, in turn, have been incorporated in whole or in part in modern proprietary operating systems, e.g., the TCP/IP networking code in Windows NT 3.1 and most of the foundation of Apple's macOS and iOS.
Looks like I was wrong, it was actually incorporated into the Microsoft NT kernel long before Windows 2000. Also, The macOS/Darwin kernel is a derivitave of the BSD kernel, Mach an alternative kernel for BSD based operating systems and NeXTSTEP.

I'd appreciate it if we could keep this conversation civil and not flamebait by calling other people's posts 'bullshit'.

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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#50

Post by NachtIntellect » Wed Mar 14, 2018 3:51 pm

rnd wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:13 pm
I'd appreciate it if we could keep this conversation civil and not flamebait by calling other people's posts 'bullshit'.
You would appreciate it? Come on now most people are entitled to their own opinions and I wouldn't really consider calling one persons post "Bullshit" as something that calls for inflammatory posts however IMO in that post you made before was more of a TL;DR kind of deal for me, myself.

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Re: Should server hosts charge for zandronum hosting?

#51

Post by nax » Fri Mar 16, 2018 3:48 am

This thread was meant to spark debate on a very real issue and was honest in its attempts to gain feedback from the community. But it was perhaps not worded as well as it could have been and sparked something that we did not really want. As a result, I will be closing this thread for now. I still would like to have an honest argument on how zandronum as a community should deal with this issue, but maybe not when there's a specific case that is still as of yet unresolved. I would like to apologize on behalf of the zandronum staff for our own misstep in this, but we still have issues to work out.

Thank you for understanding.

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