Magicosm is a project which is owned by the participants collectively in some loose proportion to contribution and effort. We had originally wanted to do the entire project open source, but that didn't work out very well. We do plan to release a huge amount of the project as open source once we have established Magicosm commercially. We always have difficulty explaining the "business" side of Magicosm, but mostly that is because we are focusing on the creation of the world, and not on who owns what. To simplify things, each person holds the copyrights to any tangible contributions to the project, like a source code file, a model, a texture, animation, etc. If anyone leaves the project they can take their contributions and do whatever they want with them, including any commercial endevor, but they cannot take any of the media/code/etc that others have produced on the team. The Magicosm team also gets to retain a copy of the contributions and use them for completing Magicosm.
The loose plan is to *NOT* sell off the game to some company, nor seek funding in any capacity that would remove our creative control of Magicosm. We are first and foremost building a dream. For this dream to be a reality it will need to be self supporting, and thus will need to be commercial. At that point we will all sit down and hash out ownership and form a Magicosm specific company. None of us are in this to become rich, although many of us would love to have be Magicosm be successful enough that we can work full time on it without the need for second jobs.
Adding new team members is a serious endeavor. It takes time to come up to speed on the project and there is a lot of material to learn. Even more important is the need for each new member of the team to "mesh" with the rest of the team. This assimilation works both ways, as each person brings their own concepts and ideas which effect the development and vision of the project. So we are slow and careful in adding new members. We are also very careful regarding the division of work, since each person "owns" a piece and is free within limits to develop that peice using design and methodology comfortable to them. Thats why we work with interfaces a lot, so the actual implementation of the interface can be flexible. So the actual client core engine (animation, terrain, geometries, etc) is something David Yazel is responsible for, while Bobby Martin is responsible for the server design and implementation. We all contribute to design in an ongoing, collaborative manner, but the details of implementation is up to the person responsible for each piece.
Team members are expected to
