I'm not opposed to distributing via Desura.
I've also been approached by Protektor late last year (on the combined Desura / ModDB / IndieDB platform). His message looked like it was directed to multiple open source projects which are not yet available on Desura (and because it's generic and nothing sensitive I bet he won't mind me publishing it):
I would love to have this available on Desura. We just need someone to keep it updated and answer user support issues/questions. If you are interested let me know.
I responded early this year, roughly a month ago:
This would be nice, however, someone who can take upon this additional workload, is responsible and sticking to this task is exactly what we're missing. In addition to an open source Desura client.
We're in Debian now (and thus soon in Ubuntu). If you had a way to transform games which were released in deb format or with MojoSetup for the Linux platforms to the format needed for a Desura installation, and a way to convert games which were released using NSIS to the Desura format, and games which were released as OS X applications to the Desura format, this would also help us. Having to maintain yet another release format just for Desura is simply a lot of overhead.
One more note I'd like to add is that I don't entirely like the idea of making Free Software (libre software) games compete with commercial games. It would be good to introduce a separate category for FOSS games, such as you have it for Indie vs AAA games already.
I haven't heard back, yet.
Summing up our discussion so far:
- We wouldn't mind to have MegaGlest on Desura
- Desura's TOS need to be reviewed to not violate our licensing terms (and not to cause any trouble for us in general).
- It is unclear how much work is involved in packaging MegaGlest for Desura, and, no less important, who would volunteer to do it.
There are also a few more open questions and requests we
may want to make towards Desura which we have not discussed so far:
- The Desura client source code has, to my knowledge, not yet been released (despite of at least two announcements to do so), and it is unclear what's blocking it. Do we want to ask for this to happen before we allow for MG to be listed on Desura, in an attempt to further the spread of open source software and to make them take a stance for open source software which goes beyond PR?
- On Desura, there is a tag 'free' for games, but it is not currently possible to search for it (which you can search for some other game properties already), do we want to request this to be possible?
- There is not currently a free software category or licensing terms search option on Desura, do we want to ask for this to be made available so that users who choose to only install free software are able to tell apart software published under FSF endorsed licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...) from freeware?
Is there anything else we should think of?
