We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it’s definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she’s interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users’ moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that “this technology works now” even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.

If he wasn’t stating things like “This is true technology that science-fiction hasn’t even written about, and this works today, now,” you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale–there’s kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light–but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.

It’s easy to say there’s no malice behind it, but the fact is he’s a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He’s not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he’s a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren’t true to secure more of it. Is that “malice”? I don’t know. It’s at least “avarice”.

Based on the article, they’re not sure if this is the same game he’s had in development since 2019, Legacy, which is some kind of business sim where you have to buy your land as NFTs then create more NFTs to sell to other players.

Step 1: Commit crimes.

I know I’m super boring, but I personally never liked see-through cases. I’m not techy enough for any of the hardware to mean anything to me, so it just looks like robot guts. Occasionally I’ve had to take controllers apart for cleaning or replacing membranes, but while it was fun seeing the insides, I wouldn’t want it all day.

Looks more like 17 minutes after launch.

This isn’t a hill I’m willing to die on at all, but it does mildly annoy me that The Open Source Definition is used by proponents to mean the same thing as “open-source”. For anyone not familiar, The Open Source Definition is a document used to determine whether code should be certified by the Open Source Initiate as “OSI Certified”. Proponents argue that anything which does not meet the OSI’s definition is not open-source, while I think there’s room in the language and the mind for disagreement on whether “open-source” and “eligible for OSI certification” are synonyms.

The OSI was originally founded with the goal of registering a trademark for “Open Source”, but this was unsuccessful as the term is too broad and descriptive. Failing that, the OSI decided to instead register the trademark “OSI Certified”, which can be applied to works which meet their Open Source Definition. Ultimately, what this means is that nobody owns the phrase “open-source” and it’s an organic part of language which is not strictly defined by the specific terms of any certifying documents.

Over the years, there have been plenty of non-commercially licensed software with source available for use: a popular example is video, computer and arcade game emulators. The MAME emulator was for years released under its own non-commercial copyleft license before eventually being relicensed under BSD (which meets OSI’s Open Source Definition), and popular SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis emulators Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX both continue to be released under similarly “open but non-commercial” licenses.

I’ll happily agree that none of those are eligible to bear the “OSI Certified” trademark and that they don’t meet OSI’s Open Source Definition. But when people start saying they’re “not open-source” it rubs me the wrong way, because we’re just talking, not trying to achieve trademark certification. Not to mention that the whole nature of software licensing is to note what restrictions there are on the use of the code, e.g. most open-source, copyleft licenses deny you the right to use their code without attribution. However, we basically all agree that that’s fine and you can still call a license open-source if it includes that restriction. It’s a shades of gray situation that people are treating as black and white just because a definition exists which they can refer back to, with the assumption that all people must subscribe to those specific terms.

There’s entirely valid counter-arguments, of course. It’s useful to have strict definitions of nebulous concepts like open-source because it could cause confusion, and you have to draw the line somewhere or else the term becomes completely meaningless. e.g. You risk people referring to things like source code leaks as “open-source”. There are frequently cases of people ignoring non-commercial license terms and selling those softwares (Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX are often bundled with commercial retro emulation hardware), which you could argue stems from confusion about whether or not commercial use is allowed. But the same devices often violate the licenses of OSD-compliant software as well, so it seems more likely they just don’t care about open-source software licensing terms.

So anyway, Genesis Plus GX is open-source but I’m not willing to fight you about it.

Don’t sell the bots short, they can probably sell you a pill that helps you conflate things.