In 2006, I profiled Insomniac, the game developers behind hits such as the Rachet and Clank franchise and, more recently, Resistance: Fall of Man. Insomniac set the standard for how to best exploit the processing power of Sony's Playstation 3.
Now the company is sharing its know-how with other developers via its Nocturnal Initiative - described as "an open collection of libraries and utilities for addressing common challenges in game development." It'll be interesting to see how this open-source style plan will be greeted in the console community. Obviously open-sourcing code has a long and rich history on the PC gaming side (id Software was an early adopter when it open-sourced code for Doom and Quake). To me, anything that fosters the development of better games should be encouraged.
