Here is an excerpt from a very useful post by Brett Bonfield on In the Library With a Lead Pipe titled W-E-B-S-I-T-E, Find Out What It Means To Me:
“It’s interesting how many people don’t really understand the concept of open source. People often describe freeware as open source, or they’ll describe free web-based applications as open source, or applications with APIs that allow for mashups. There are articles all the time, on some of the most popular websites, that recommend free software but don’t distinguish programs the authors gives away for free from software that is actually open source.
For a program to be open source, it has to meet two basic qualifications
- The author has to provide full access to its source code
- The software has to be accompanied by a license that protects the contributions and rights of the community…
In my opinion, there are seven open source software projects worth considering
- Blacklight (demo)
- Evergreen (demo)
- Kochief (demo)
- Koha (demo)
- Scriblio (demo)
- SOPAC (demo)
- VuFind (demo)
There’s some apples-and-oranges going on here, in that some of these packages are just components of a website and require other software in order to do everything a library website needs to do (such as inventory management). Other packages cover the entire process…”
If it helps, I find that when you have players who got a transform for the stat card, it helps to treat them like that isn’t the case, even if you know it is. If someone became a Death Elemental for the L337 skillz, but they are constantly approached by NPCs who call their bluff and expect them to actually act like a Death Elemental, they will either shape up and adapt to the RP, or ditch their transform.
One way of handling the power disparity between transformed and not-transformed PC is to only activate transforms on closed mods. So for a weekend plotline that involves a bunch of different modules to solve, one of those might require that PCs be transformed to go. Sometimes they make weird exceptions and give non-transformed people temporary empowerments if some IG circumstance requires them to go on the mod, but otherwise its pretty strict. So having a transform gives you the ability to go on these ‘pop mods,’ but it’s never activated in mixed company.
(I’d never heard of this way of dealing with them until I played in Massachusetts, so it definitely seems like a Northeast thing, but it seems like something that could easily be applied elsewhere).