I'll try to write about everyone's contributions on my blog and add it to the readme. Thanks again for everyone's help. Eric S. Raymond (open source programmer guy) wrote that open source is a "gift" culture that rewards people based on the size of their contribution, basically you get gratitude instead of cool cash. You can read more Eric Raymond and his writings
here.
Below is Eric Raymond's 19 steps to creating good open source software, I'll write my (witty) response in parentheses.
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. (I want to play Magic against an AI.)
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite and reuse.
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. (MTG Forge version 1, ouch.)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. (Magic and AI are interesting.)
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. (Hi, Dennis
)
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. (Dennis and Rob are administrators on the Google Project page.)
7.Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. (What's a customer?)
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. (We need more people, ha.)
9.Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. (Hm..I think I need an example please.)
10.If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11.The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected. (Example please, I'm confused. Does cards.txt count?)
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to! (MTG Forge is NOT a gateway drug.)
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17.A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets. (MTG Forge has no secrets, so it is very secure.)
18.To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. (Again, Magic and AI.)
19.Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. (That would be Dennis and not me
)