Online Petitions suck, here's another idea
Ok I know a few of you have been bothering me about the status of the petition to open the code of GTA1 and/or GTA2. Here is what happened.
Months ago when the petition signature size reached about 1000 I printed out the sheets even though the online petition site wasn't very printer friendly, riddled with Google ads. I did the best I could to throw it up in a usable format by copying and pasting 15 pages and editing out the extra banner waste. I also threw in a link to see the petitions if anyone receiving the petition wanted to confirm its validity and so I put the link up on the header and footer of each petition page. The printable version came out to about 40 pages (margins :-) ) a hefty pack of online signatures, that I knew were half duplicates. To give the petition a little touch of humanity I appended a small but concise letter stating the reasons why openGTA would be a good idea. To this day there was no reply either by email or by regular mail. I had placed the paperwork in an envelope with my return address appended but silence is the response.
I should have realized that online petitions are a waste of time to really try to get something like this done but it was actually a good measure of how many people (divided by 2) are genuinely interested in opening the source code and doing some cool things with the oldies.
I have a new proposal that I think will make more of an impact or perhaps at least raise a few eyebrows. The internet is a bad place to express interest in doing something if that entity you are looking to influence is big company with lots of cash. We need to send Snail-mail letters to Take-Two's HQ. The power of a type written letter in an actual letter is probably at least worth 50 emails and unlike a petition it will show some sort of "face behind the mission". If we can get 50 or even 100 distinct letters sent to Rockstar I believe perhaps we can at least get a response from them.
If you do decide to write a letter, which doesn't have to be very long, it should convey your interest in the games and tell them why, in a non confrontational way, they should open the code for us. How do you think they will benefit? " We will benefit?
For anyone in North America the address for TakeTwo/Rockstar is:
Take-Two Interactive Games
622 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
For those in the UK or other parts of Western Europe:
Rockstar-North
Calton Square
1 Greenside Row
Edinburgh
Mid Lothian
Scotland
EH1 3AP
The only thing we are losing here is postage, maybe 10 minutes, and 1 sheet of printed paper.
Months ago when the petition signature size reached about 1000 I printed out the sheets even though the online petition site wasn't very printer friendly, riddled with Google ads. I did the best I could to throw it up in a usable format by copying and pasting 15 pages and editing out the extra banner waste. I also threw in a link to see the petitions if anyone receiving the petition wanted to confirm its validity and so I put the link up on the header and footer of each petition page. The printable version came out to about 40 pages (margins :-) ) a hefty pack of online signatures, that I knew were half duplicates. To give the petition a little touch of humanity I appended a small but concise letter stating the reasons why openGTA would be a good idea. To this day there was no reply either by email or by regular mail. I had placed the paperwork in an envelope with my return address appended but silence is the response.
I should have realized that online petitions are a waste of time to really try to get something like this done but it was actually a good measure of how many people (divided by 2) are genuinely interested in opening the source code and doing some cool things with the oldies.
I have a new proposal that I think will make more of an impact or perhaps at least raise a few eyebrows. The internet is a bad place to express interest in doing something if that entity you are looking to influence is big company with lots of cash. We need to send Snail-mail letters to Take-Two's HQ. The power of a type written letter in an actual letter is probably at least worth 50 emails and unlike a petition it will show some sort of "face behind the mission". If we can get 50 or even 100 distinct letters sent to Rockstar I believe perhaps we can at least get a response from them.
If you do decide to write a letter, which doesn't have to be very long, it should convey your interest in the games and tell them why, in a non confrontational way, they should open the code for us. How do you think they will benefit? " We will benefit?
For anyone in North America the address for TakeTwo/Rockstar is:
Take-Two Interactive Games
622 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
For those in the UK or other parts of Western Europe:
Rockstar-North
Calton Square
1 Greenside Row
Edinburgh
Mid Lothian
Scotland
EH1 3AP
The only thing we are losing here is postage, maybe 10 minutes, and 1 sheet of printed paper.
posted by Steven Day at 2:50 PM
1 Comments:
Good for people to know.
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