James Dixon’s Blog

Cyan Worlds has decided to release the source code for Myst Online (Uru Live) to open source.

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet in his ‘Can open source save gaming companies?‘ post seems to think that Cyan is trying to save the company from dying. I read it differently, I think they are trying to save the software from dying.

Here is a quote from Cyan:

But we’ve poured so much into UruLive, and it has touched so many, that we could not just let it whither and die. We still have hopes that someday we will be able to provide new content for UruLive and/or work on the next UruLive.

They seem to be viewing open source as a way to keep Myst alive. This is probably from both personal reasons and also with the hope that at some point Cyan might be able to monetize it again.

I think Matthew Aslett at 451 Group reads it the way I do and points out that open source is not a panacea

Michael Schiff over at Enterprise Systems Journal seems to agree with my last post

http://www.esj.com/business_intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=9261

Prediction #3: Open Source Growth will Accelerate

Economic pressure will accelerate the growth of open source technology as well, especially as open source has now established itself in production deployments. Because many vendors are utilizing source technology in their applications in order to reduce costs or, as in the case of several data warehouse appliance vendors, partnering with open source business intelligence and data integration vendors to offer a more complete solution, the growth will be seen in both standalone and embedded environments.