Fwd: [FSF] Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming
Something we might want to look at, an AGPLv3 & CC-BY-SA 3.0 game:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Brown <info@fsf.org>
Date: Thu, May 6, 2010 at 8:01 PM
Subject: [FSF] Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming
To: info-fsf@fsf.org, info-press@fsf.org
Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming--Ryzom Announces Full Release of
Source Code and Artwork, and a Partnership with the Free Software
Foundation to Host a Repository of the Game's Artistic Assets.
Press release: http://dev.ryzom.com/news/13 and at
http://www.fsf.org/news/free-ryzom-1
By Brett Smith - FSF Licensing Compliance Engineer
Ryzom is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG),
where players work together to explore a fantasy world and set out on
various quests. Today, the Ryzom team has released the game as free
software: both the client and server programs have been released under
the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, while its models,
textures, and other art are covered by CC-BY-SA 3.0.
This release is probably the single-biggest contribution to free
software games yet. If you missed it, check out the press release. We're
thankful to the Ryzom team for making this release, and excited about
the possibilities it presents to all free software games. The code is
tested and proven, having run the Ryzom game since 2004, and the
art—more than 13 gigabytes of data—can be adapted and used in other
games. This release can provide a lot of new resources and energy for
free software game development.
Since we're expecting people to have a lot of interest in this release,
we wanted to provide some detailed information up-front about exactly
what has and has not been released, and suggestions for ways developers
can contribute to the project effectively.
All of the code necessary to run both the client and server software has
been released under AGPLv3. If you want to play on the official Ryzom
server today, you can do that using only free software. Modified clients
will not be allowed to connect to the official server, but a testing
server is available to try them out.
If you want to run your own server for the game, you have the software
to do that, but you won't really have any world data—information about
geography, special places, characters, quests, items, and so on—to run
it with. Winch Gate Properties, the company that currently holds the
copyright for all game materials and runs the official server, has
decided not to release that data, to avoid causing disruption for their
current player community. People who want to run their own server will
need to develop their own world to do so—only a small test world comes
with the code.
Unfortunately, that development can't be done with free software,
because most of the world creation process depends on proprietary 3-D
modeling software. Work is already underway to eliminate those
dependencies and use free software alternatives like Blender. This is
the next big task that needs to be done to make Ryzom even more useful
to the free software community, so if you'd like to help, please see the
project page for more information. In the meantime, the server code may
be adapted for other games.
Art files from the game, including both textures and 3-D models, have
been released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. The FSF is helping distribute these
files by hosting a mirror for the Ryzom media server. You can use these
files in other games, software, artistic works—anywhere, really—under
the terms of that license. Music and sound effects are not being
released today because Winch Gate does not have the legal rights to do
so, but they are trying to find an arrangement that will see these files
released under a free license as well.
Today's release offers free software developers a lot of opportunities,
both to contribute to Ryzom and to improve other software. If you see a
project that you'd like to see benefit, please get involved! For more
information about this release, including downloads and more projects
underway, please visit the Ryzom team's page.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/ryzom-free-software
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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